Cathy Jean

Back to the inktense pencils and figure drawing. All these different artistic styles and media are like spinning plates and if I don't keep coming back to practice, all my skills and experience will disappear.  And with there being an England game on at 5, I didn't want to go the full watercolour and feel rushed.

Subject matter today is Cathy Jean, a blues singer, so not an artistic model today.  It's based on the cover of her In The Remains album, an album that I haven't got and that is out of print but whose availability I'm continuing to monitor.

I started with iris blue and bright blue.  The album cover gave me a cold feeling rather than warm, so blues felt like the right way to go.  There wasn't enough difference between these so I added indigo in the darkest bits.  CJ's hair started as sun yellow, with a bit of baked earth for variety.  The pencil marks and the water on top were both curled in scribbly marks rather than just marked up and down.  Jewellery and the brightest bits on the shoes were also inked in sun yellow.  Iris blue and bright blue were used for the wall on the left and baked earth for the floor.

I wasn't satisfied with the outcome.  The yellow was too stark against the blues, resulting in a lack of harmony.  So I added some orange to both the adornments and the hair to tone them both down.  At the same time, I added occlusion shadows in violet.  And then added some leaf green to the flesh in places, remembering how this makes the skintones look more exotic.  Finally, I added some edges in violet where I thought they were needed.

I think the final result is pretty good.  I like the green skintones, the texture of the hair and what little I've drawn of the head.  The hands are also OK for once, and there's a bit of missing edge in the small of her back.  Her right leg is the weakest bit of the painting.

She's not going in the shop,window with a leg like that,