Magnusson Journal Entries

1 creative work found

• painting " behind the mask "
  by Marie Magnusson

  I really enjoy seing other peoples step-by-step how a painting has come to life so I thought I’d post one of my own ;-) this painting …

  I really enjoy seing other peoples step-by-step how a painting has come to life so I thought I’d post one of my own ;-) this painting has taken me a looong time to finish, mostly because I am so busy trying to finish my PhD on time ;-) As it really was a step-by-step process (normally I finish a painting much quicker) I decided to take photos after each session. I started out with very thin paint to outline my idea. First I thought there would be masses of red feathers coming out of her carnivale-costume hat, which later changed to just being a wrapped-shawl-kind-of thing. / The next session I added a thin wash of blue for shadows, and after that some more details and a high-collared robe. After that i decided a dark background would work better, and this was also when I discarded the feather idea. / after this I kept adding layers of red (from my new tube of wonderful cadmium red!) and playing around with thin layers of colour to the face. This is my first attempt at real skin colour, (as opposed to the orange or blue I normally use ;-)) and I am quite happy with the result. I still need to work on skin colour shading but I think I will leave this painting for now so I don’t ovework it, she just have to be more painterly than realistic which I actually like. As i was taking the final photo the other day, the sun was playing tricks with my camera, and one of the photos came out really dark in the lower right corner, like below. I think this artifact looks great, and I might just go back to the painting and darken it a bit more.