Ann And Rebecca On The Shiraz

With England poised to score an innings victory over India at Headingley, it was never going to be anything but the inktense pencils today.  I'm too messy with the watercolours and oil pastels to be allowed to use them indoors in front of the telly.  Oh, I could have gone for markers I guess.  But  didn't.  Oh well.

I wanted to keep pushing myself, so I tried out some new ideas on this one.  I also gave myself the challenge of a double.  The new idea I tried was to mark out everything in rollerball to start with.  With a table and chairs in there, this also nailed down my perspective early on.  I also tried out some cross hatch shading on the tables and chairs as I wanted these to be in a different style to the models.

To try to keep everything fitting together, I made sure to reuse the colours on the wine, wine label and nail varnish in the flesh tones.  I also tried to distinguish the two models by using more red in the one on the left and more green in the one on the right.  For the wooden table and chairs., I started with earth6 tones but the added in the occasional extra colour when I was putting in the flesh tones.

I wasn't that happy with what I ended up with, so I did one last bit of tinkering, adding in a complementary background in tangerine and sun yellow.

It's still not great, though, is it?  Rollerball lines are too defining (leaving me missing edges or ambiguities) and too monotonous with all the lines the same width.  The cross hatching hasn't really worked - it would have been far better to just use dark tones.  Still, if you don't have experiments that fail, you'll never learn anything.  So I'm done with starting with rollerball on works like this (although I don't rule it out for urban landscapes).  I'm not sure whether the figures are too dark or too light.  This looks like a watercolour without a value plan: I think I need to keep my figure drawings simple.  If I want a chair, then only one figure.  If I want two figures, then no furniture.

One for the bin.