THE FATES
FINISHED PAINTING
May 9 2013: The original sketch (thumbnails)
May 10: Three compositional studies for heads (thumbnails)
May 11: Start of the painting 30" X 36" (thumbnails)
May 13: Trudging through the underpainting
pencil work overtop of B&W print out of the painting above
Just fixing the faces as a result of above pencil work... Same long day
May 14
May 15
And suddenly I discovered a problem that another viewer might have already seen at first glance. Looking at it straight, I still wasn't sure so then I took the image to the mirror to see how bad it was and it was suddenly as clear as day. Below is the problem and the fix done on May 16.
May 17: The following is the result of a four hour session working on drapery and tonal consistency. This is all still underpainting.
May 18: Very close to being ready to start painting colours now. Here I'm trying to get a proper tone for the background elements and working on the compositional smooth eye movements so the spindle had to be redone. The central figure's hair also gets a rework. It is 30 hours here.
May 19: And I started glazing. This is the result after 5 hours of glazing and drybrushing flesh. There's two taken in different light as I don't yet know which is the more correct.
May 20: Next is one hurried hour of painting a glaze of light Prussian blue atop the sienna under painting
May 21. Thirty minutes of sprint painting...
May 22. 8 1/2 hours total now of colouring.
May 23: Three more hours and it is mostly spent working on flesh tones. It may be steps back rather than forward as I did umber emphasis then white highlights then pink additions with the expectation of doing a general glaze of a 'flesh hue' overtop to remove some of the variance. We shall see.
Also I began to put cobalt blue glaze over the shadow areas of the cloth. Currently it is just in the torso of the central figure.
May 25th: Five and a half difficult hours. The progress may not even be noticeable.
May 26: A dry, thick translucent paste, tinted with pink flesh tones (Burnt Sienna and White) is applied over all 'finished' flesh. It is odd to work with. 2 hours. 55 1/2 hours have been spent on it at this point. At $15/hour wage and discounting materials, I should market it at $860.
May 27 and 28: 5 hours, complicated by the wax layer not being dry enough in a single day. Also, my camera might be blurring the top half of everything now. :/ I'm doing low lights and high lights with thin glazes of umber and dry brushes and glazes of of titanium white. The background sky gets another layer.
May 29: 2 hours of background work and highlights and little touches. I'm becoming tentative.
May 30th. Two hours of work doing mostly hair
June 1st: 4.5 more hours. Getting very close to calling it finished. One more hair to do and the lilies and other little things. So that's 69 hours so far.
June 2nd was spend working for two hours demoing and touching up.
June 6th, after a 3 day break I come back to it for two hours. This includes lily work and tiny touch-ups here and there. I intend to cover the lilies in a prussian blue wash when they are dried.
