paola

watercolor on Arches CP 300 gsm, 14" x 10".

second in the paola series. we were working outside and she stretched out on one of my sun loungers, making for a great image.

i bumped up the chroma in most of the colors and mixed her "hot" skin tones primarily of quinacridone gold and quinacridone magenta, muted with a little phthalocyanine green YS and perylene maroon or burnt sienna.

her face, which was in complete shadow and rather dark in the reference photo, required a lot of fine tuning to harmonize with the lighted parts of the figure and appear darkened but chromatically balanced -- not too yellow, red or blue. (a green bias ended up looking yellow.)

the previous painting was done in a very "liquid" style in which all the areas (with the exception of the hair) were rendered with juicy washes tilted and blotted to create very smooth diffusion modeling. in this painting i relied more on the brush to model the figure, but still tried to keep the edge transitions soft.