Fan Dance
Acrylic on 11 x 14 gallery wrapped canvas
This week I'm talking a bit about FAN DANCE, another in my figurative series.
I pulled up a lovely couple of old photos of a boy and girl, that I felt had a “story”. They were from a batch of photos I took years ago at a RenFaire. I sketched out the boy and girl figures, and reworked their features/expressions to suit the story I had in mind. I did a quickie colour sketch that you can see in the upper left of the photo. With such great lights and darks to work with....the underpainting went quickly.
After laying in all the major masses of color, I went to work on what I consider the “ice cream” portion of a painting....the faces. For maximum sunlight in the painting, I kept the main costumes in the light range of colors.....so's I could play off reflective light bouncing around.
I included the little white awning and its support on the craft cart where the girl is selling her fans.....but I was a bit hesitant at so much stark white dividing the couple, in the composition. But it had “worked” on the bitty color sketch, so I went with it. In the sketch I had some sunlit trees and a pathway in the background, but later changed that to a gravel path leading up to the cart.
Here the features of both the boy and girl have been sketched in. I went on to adjust both the main characters' features and expressions to “say” what I wanted. I painted in the fans set out for sale and called this one....DONE!
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