A Renioresque watercolour

I saw a photograph on www.paintmyphoto.ning.com and was immediately taken with it.  Although the photograph was fairly recent, it had that old fashioned look about it.  This was just asking to be painted, so I did a watercolour of it tonight.

I am not one for painting flowers, in fact I am not very good at it, but my hope is that the little girl will attract the attention more.

The Red Pen.

This loose watercolour figure painting is typical of the type of work that I have been doing recently.  It is similar to another painting on here called, 'Reflection', whereby the subject is busy writing on a piece of paper.  

In this version the person is turned around more towards the viewer.  His head leans forward, which presents interesting foreshortening challenges.  With not much to look at in the way of features,  the focal point moves towards his hands.  This was the real attraction to me.  I am a big fan of drawing and painting hands.

The skin tones on view on the hands, arms and face have a subtle mixture of warm and cool tones sitting adjacent to each other.  The blue shirt and grey hair give an overall cool cast to the figure.

Loose ink Elvis

It is good to get back to painting for myself,  after a long period of commissions over the Christmas period.

I was looking through some old You Tube videos of a young Elvis Presley in action.  I knew the exact pose I wanted and I also could visualise how it was going to look.  I wanted lots of movement and energy in the painting, so I opted for Indian ink and my trusty painting tool, the plastic fork with one tine.

Using the fork as a painting tool allows me to be very sketchy and loose.  I added two  shades of blue watercolour for his denims and a little red and yellow ochre for the skin tones.  The whole painting took around three minutes to complete.  Freeze framing the video gave me the exact pose that I was looking for.  Perfectly balanced, he wound up to a big finish for his song.

The film was Called Loving You.  His second movie.  Hope you like my interpretation.