Painting the bead board.

It took me all day to paint the bead board on Sunday but I finished, all but the baseboards. When I started it last weekend, it took forever to paint just three boards. And I was only painting the bead part. The paint dried too much during the week, so I started from scratch again with the dark white formula, mixing in more Naples yellow light (this time I used Windsor Newton) and cobalt blue than I had in the previous session. After much mixing, I got the background blending color right and it served me well to start.

From that mixture, I added a Van Dyke brown and phthalo turquoise mixture to create the darkest part of the beadwork, the valley. The boards have a basic v-bead-v pattern, so I also created two lighter shadow tints of the same formula and a very light tint to be the highlight by adding white mixed with Naples Yellow light.

I painted from the top down, one board at a time, painting a thin line of darkest color (valley) over the pencil marks I laid out last week. I used my new Series 7 #1 for most of the work. Then I painted the darker shadow on the right side of the right v (about the same thickness) and the lighter shadow color along the right side of the left v (about twice as wide). Then I painted the highlight on the left sides of the v (s) giving more width to the one on the bead. Then I painted the background blend color along the right side of the right v, the center of the bead and the left side of the left v. While doing the shadows and highlights, I worked each part only so far down the board at a time.

The subtle shadowing I had accomplished in the gradient background in January now became my challenge, as my background blending color had to also change in order to blend sufficiently. So, to my background blending color, for instance, I would add a little of the lightest shadow as I worked my way down (getting darker as I came down and across the canvas.) I did the same with the shadows. For the highlight, I added more white mixed with Naples yellow as I went from left to right across the canvas, but reverting back to the darker highlight as I reached the bottom right of the background. Confused? I was too!

I tried to be careful, but at this time my bead board only looked like a series of imperfect tonal stripes. It was in the blending, with my fat filbert brush, that the shapes became real as I carefully dragged the dry brush up the painting, trying to keep vertical and not waver my hand, as that made shaky s-curves in the paint. The filbert blended the colors great. I finished it off with the fan brush going down and the painting went fast for a while, as I was into the short boards that only show above her head. Still it took quite a while to finish up. For the last touch, I added a few cracks into the right v here and there, where the boards meet. Luckily for me, the wainscoting in Jen’s kitchen had been painted multiple times, so my none-too-perfect rendition actually looked like paint!

Emilia's shirt

I'm posting this in response to a request to see the texture of Emilia's shirt (click the photo). As I said in a comment, the shirt is done in a more painterly, loose fashion, although the embroidery on the sleeve (the other one isn't finished) is more tightly rendered. I added that in general, I was concerned with making the center of interest (her face) the most tightly rendered. I do this because the eye is drawn to the most detail.

Here's the thing, though, even if I hadn't given her face the most detail, it would have drawn the eye. Any time there is a figure in a painting, it will draw the eye of the viewer. People are just hard-wired to notice anything like the shape of another human being. And any time a face is visible, that's where the eye will go. So I'm just reinforcing it here.

I thought you might like to see a photo of my studio. The part you can't see is where all the mess is...