Painter's block

I have reached something of a wall with my current painting, mostly because I am not entirely pleased with the composition.  As I cannot post a piece of my work yet, here are some beautiful pieces by iiiis, which I have scanned from my book.  I'm feeling very much like the girl with the birds flying around her head at the moment...

計白當黑, ji bai dang hei, is the Mandarin term for the Chinese technique of leaving blanks of white paper in a watercolour painting.  The blank paper is part of the finished painting, an idea I personally like very much because I am very much of the 'unfinished' school; I cannot bear to, as it were, 'finish things' and cover a whole page with paint.  I remember my art teacher constantly chiding me for never completing a painting, so imagine how delighted I was to find out that not finishing things was actually an ancient and viable technique!

A Painting Story

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

She is melting into that on which she lies, and yet marked out from it.  We look through to her and yet she is part of the frame.  She is in a dream-scape that could not exist and yet we recognise it...

SO this is my day's work, and the first painting I have finished for a long time.  The materials are F pencil and watercolour on Langton watercolour paper by Daler Rowney.  I wanted to echo natural and artificial shapes throughout, hence the petal shape of her breast, the flower-like structure in the top left of the painting, and the window frame shapes to the right.  She is taken from a May 2008 Vogue shoot of Natalia Vodianova in Russia, of which I loved the pose, the colours and style of her clothes, the beautiful balance of her face and the helmet-like hat that covers her hair.  I have tried to hint at something of the Art Deco and Nouveau, two movements decades apart but unusually complimentary.  I suppose you will think, as I do, that she was stunningly beautiful before I made the colours stronger and put down the paynes-grey outlines, but I couldn't leave her like this because the orange of the koi was so strong that she became a little washed out.  I also wanted to make primary the area around her face and the outlines of the birds, creating a vertical sweep made from bird to bird.  I was heavily influenced by iiiis' work here, and the fish and birds are taken from his book.

Hand will paint!

I can do some gentle painting today, the hand is a little less stiff.  I haven't used watercolours for a long time, so I felt the need to copy something in order to get back into the swing of things.  This illustration hasn't come from my own imagination I'm afraid, but from the beautiful ideas of a Chinese 'manhua' artist called 'iiiis'.  I picked up the book in a little manga shop in the old quarter of Jiangmen whilst I was living there.  I can never get tired of it and I constantly find new interest in every page, maybe I'll post some scans up soon.