Monday 16 March 2015

16/03: KNOWING WHEN TO STOP

When is a painting/drawing finished?   

I guess we've all overworked our paintings/drawings in the past and regretted it but the urge to 'fiddle' and 'tweak' can be overwhelming at times.

I've got to the stage with the Fisherman portrait where I'm rushing it so am going to call it a day now and put it to one side.   

My last three coloured pencil drawings are also 'out of sight' temporarily to stop me fiddling.   They probably are finished but I plan to re-visit them in a couple of weeks and make any adjustments then, after looking at them again with fresh eyes.

I wanted to put in the blue background colours as he was photographed against a building with blue door/window frames and I thought it added a bit of interest ... but getting the depth of colour is very time consuming and I reckon I've spent nearly as long on these two stripes of blue as I spent on his face!   I could probably have speeded up the process by using pastel (assuming the Derwent paper accepts pastel) but I'm trying to make my portraits pure coloured pencil so they can be entered into the pure CP category in UKCPS exhibitions.




I have lots of ref. photos of 'characters' photographed during recent trips to our home on Fuerteventura (Canary Islands) and just couldn't make up my mind which ones to work on ... so I sent a selection of them via email to friends/family and asked them to vote for their 1, 2 & 3 favourites.

They've all replied now so the decision has been taken out of my hands and I'm happy to crack on with the 3 that got the most 'votes' - watch this space LOL


8 comments:

  1. Oh, my, Sue, he's great! Still pretty scary looking but it's a great painting.

    Can't wait to see what you work on next - hurry up! You know I hate to wait!!!

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  2. when i'm bored with a drawing, thats usually my cue to put it away, its finished. of course I don't always do that and ruin things :p

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  3. when i'm bored with a drawing, thats usually my cue to put it away, its finished. of course I don't always do that and ruin things :p

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  4. I know that fisherman, I have met him in the south of France, in Italy and lots of other similar places. He is so typical of the breed. Great job as usual Sue.

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  5. Oh he's another handsome one. You sure know how to pick 'em, Sue. I love that the color of his sweater is pulled up into the skin around his left eye. Draws the eye upward.

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  6. Incredible drawing... I know exactly what you mean about knowing (or not knowing!!)when something is finished!! In a workshop I was running today I suggested to several people their paintings might be finished... don't think many of them listened though!!

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  7. Thanks Ladies, I'm tackling something a bit out of my comfort zone at the moment so won't show any progress pics till I know whether its working

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  8. Amazing portrait, I always admire how much detail you put in your work.

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