Contours

Prismacolor is hosting a contest on their Facebook page, where the grand prize winner may have his artwork appear on one of their 2012 tins. I decided to create a piece specifically for the contest.  A few years ago we did a makeover on a small room in our house, converting it to a den.  The walls were painted a rich terra cotta color, and one of the lamps was red stained glass.  I nicknamed it “The Red Room”, and did a piece called “In the Red Room” (12″H x 9″W Prismacolor pencil on red Artspectrum Colourfix paper, 2007).  Earlier this year I was thinking about some ideas for pieces and took a few photos for some poses, and one of these became “The Red Room, Revisited” (15″H x 10″W Prismacolor pencil on black Artspectrum Colourfix paper, December 2011).  Here’s a picture of both pieces side by side:

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Moving into the home stretch.  I need to refine the sheet pattern on the right, then start putting in the fine details, including the final darks and lights.  Maybe I’ll finish it next weekend!

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This weekend I turned a corner on the picture, and hit the point where everything is drawn and I can focus on pushing in color and building value.  The pattern on the pillow is still giving me trouble, but strangely the pattern in the sheets is coming together on its own.  I decided to hit the piece with a layer of fixative before continuing work early today, because it was getting pretty waxy and difficult to see how dark some areas were.  I’m always a little nervous about doing that too early, because the paper becomes slicker overall, but it seemed to work okay.  I also encountered the usual paradox where my darks didn’t seem dark enough, but in actuality I needed to make all of my lights lighter.

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Slow going, but steady progress.  The pattern in the sheet is going to drive my bonkers, but I feel the angles and lines it makes really add to the movement of the composition.  I think I’m happiest with how the hand turned out – I was worried about the foreshortened hand being front and center, but that part went actually surprisingly easily.  The lower right hand portion of the picture still has the least amount of work done, just with blocking and a few glazes of jade green to color correct.  You can see the pattern of wrinkles in the sheets starting to form.

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9″ x 12″ Prismacolor colored pencil on storm blue Colourfix paper.