Chocolatier or Chocolates, a Vintage Dress and a Smile....What's Not to Like?

 

Detail of Chocolatier 20x30 inches on black illustration board

Using mostly Polychromos colored pencils, Daniel Smith watercolours and Golden Open Acrylics – Used an old family photo and my own photo references

 

This time around I'm mixing THREE media, using colored pencils, watercolors and acrylics. I ran across a photo of this lovely lady in a stash of old family photos. She was with a few friends posing beside a pond and looking ever so stylish. Her dress, of striped duplioni silk drew me just as much as her smile. I pulled up a pic I'd taken of an old Nashville building and combined them in this drawing I did on black illustration board. The dress, face and hands are actually painted with a thin coat of acrylic white.

 

I wanted her and her dress to stand out the most, which is why I painted the dress, face and hands with the white paint, to use that as a surface that was already bright. I wanted the background window and awning to stay well.....in the background. So I used mostly Polychromos coloured pencils to draw in the striped awning, window reflections and window display, leaving the black background for the awning shadow and window glass. The Polychromos pencils covered the black wonderfully, but kept their place in the total composition.

Now comes the watercolor part. In my mind's eye, when I saw the old sepia photo, I “saw” a highly reflective silk dupolni material.....gold coloured shot with a bit of rose and green....sort of a triple gold look. When I looked thru my watercolour stock, the colours that fit the bill were mostly Daniel Smith colours. I put out a few of them, and brushed them on, horizontally across the skirt, using a “fur” brush you can see off to the side. This gave me fine lines to show the cloth's weave. Then the fun part.....”erasing” some of the watercolour paint with plain water, over those brightest highlights in the folds of the cloth. Darker watercolours brushed off onto the plain black illustration board let the dress go 'round the girls body and off into heavy shadow.

 

 

Here's the completed painting showing what was used where:

  

And a final image in the frame, showing the little “mini-me” image that I did before I started. It's sort of a thumbnail, on the black illustration board just to see what the different media would do.