My Left Foot

After painting The Graduate, I wanted to keep experimenting with the oil pastels.  I've still not really worked out what I'll normally be painting with them.  The colours are great for landscapes, and one landscape has been sold, but I also think I'm going to enjoy figure drawing and portraits as they seem to fit more with the whole tactile feel of the medium.

Anyway, subject choice was a bit limited today as the iPad battery was running low - the Photos app is almost as bad as YouTube for battery munching.  So I looked around for what there was available for me to paint and ended up deciding on my left foot.

I drew an outline using contour drawing techniques, concentrating as much on the negative shapes around the toes as much as the toes themselves and the negative shapes around the toenails as much as the toenails themselves.

And then I coloured the foot in with impressionistic colours.  I did this by dabbing spots on in one colour, then dabbing in other colours, trying to find the gaps between previous dabs.  Then I rubbed the colours together using my fingers, or rubber things on sticks wherever my fingers were too big.  Where the first attempt wasn't quite right, I put more colours over the top.  I finished by scraping out some detail with the corner of a bent piece of plastic that wasn't a credit card but was supposed to be kept in a credit card in a wallet - free membership of some club or something.  And because I'd left loads of finger prints around the outside, I added a green background.

There's obviously no point putting this one up for sale but I quite like it.  The colours make it look gangrenous but that's not a big deal.  What's more important is that there's a good three-dimensional feel to the foot.

I need to start thinking about what size oil pastel paintings I want to be producing going forward.  So far they've all been 6 inches by 9.5.  When I get to the end of my current pad (I think I've used eight pages and have four to go), do I stick with the same size or move on to 9.5 inches by 12?  Which size paper am I best suited to?