"She" . . .

  .  .  . a work in progress, sitting on the easel, waiting for inspiration.

Lovely Laura asked in her comment after yesterday's post, whether I would share what I used to make the textures in the figure holding up the moon.  I'd be more than happy to!

For that part of the painting.  I finally decided to use some of the Super Heavy Gesso which I had squirreled away in my stash of art supplies.

available here

I love how easily I could sculpt it with a palette knife.  It's very similar to modeling paste (or molding pasted, depending on the manufacturer), but it's lighter and reacts just like regular gesso when you apply the paint.  This gesso just takes longer to dry because of the thickness.

This is how the figure looked after the first few light washes of acrylic:

And as I showed you in the previous post, this is how it now looks:

Now, here's the problem I've encountered.

In order to get the colors on the figure, I used several washes of acrylic, along with a layer of matte gel medium, and some oil pastels.  I rubbed back some of the acrylic colors with a bit of muslin to get the colors into the ridges while removing the paint a bit from the higher areas.

Then, instead of grabbing the wax pastels which I wanted to use, I grabbed some oil pastels* by mistake and started happily applying the luscious creamy colors.  It looks really, really nice, but oil pastels never dry completely.  Never.  Ever.  And so far I haven't found any definitive information on how to protect oil pastel work, except to frame it under glass.  So unless I can figure out something, the parts of the canvas with the oil pastel will always be susceptible to smudging.

There are little dibs and dabs of oil pastel all over the canvas.  I was really going crazy with those creamy little sticks of heaven for quite a while, before I realized I'd better contain my enthusiasm.

That's the problem I'm working on right now.  Apparently, you can't put any kind of sealant on the oil pastels to protect them.  There's so much controversy about how to protect oil pastels, there are so many "don'ts" and I'm totally confused at this point.  So I'm going to experiment a bit, and I'll let you know what  happens.

I decided a while ago to stop following most of the rules of art, anyway.  Rules inhibit creativity, and life is too short to memorize everyone else's rules, anyway.  Right?

I had a few other issues with the painting before I got it to this point.  Originally, I had the yellow and red horizontal stripes and dots going along both sides of the figure.  That was much too bright, and drew the eyes away from the figure.  So I added a wash of blue paint over the stripes on the right side to tone them down, and I like that much better, except for the hard edge it created.  I was going to try to avoid creating too many hard edges in my work from now on.  Old habits are hard to break, though.

I'm also pretty happy with how the area on the lower right corner of the canvas is coming along:

And I like the top right section:

And the top left section is making me happy, too:

While I like how the bottom left section looks by itself, I'm not happy with how it looks as part of the whole painting, so there will be quite a few changes here:

So that's where I am right now.   Waiting for all kinds of inspiration.  If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

Thanks for stopping by!


* I didn't want to use my precious Sennelier oil pastels on this piece.  The Mungyo are really, really nice, creamy and full of pigment and not nearly as expensive as Sennelier and Holbein.  :)