Blue & Green Mask

"Blue & Green Mask"

I don't like doing portraits of anyone else because I'm prone to leave out details that they expect and include details they would rather not see. I guess that's the reason I prefer to do masks instead of faces. This isn't really a mask, but I added the word to the title later. Whatever. The task at hand, from the artistic challenge, was to do a face with the fewest marks possible. I nailed that “problem”, to use the shop talk of artists. What I would really love to be able to do is recreate the pencil marks in metal and be able to suspend them in air with no visible means of support. That's the limitation of physical reality that an artist escapes from when an image is created on the flat surface of a two-dimensional work or with a computer and digital imaging. I think I wrote down Blue & Green at the time because the drawing had a sense of there being a blue and green hue about the face, like theater lighting. I don't know. I just wish he would stop staring at me from the paper of the sketchbook. Time to flip to another drawing.

Oliver Loveday © 051211:11:40am EDT

"Blue & Green Mask"
pencil
5 x 3.5 inches | 12.7 x 8.9 cm
Strathmore 50 lb | 74 g/m
January 9, 2010

On April 26, 2016, I began the task of doing a series of watercolor paintings based upon the sketches from the "Tunnel Vision Tapes". The process involved using charcoal to sketch out the lines from the pencil sketch. The goal is to get as close as I can to those original lines within a few minutes. Then I would go over the charcoal with an eraser to smudge and push the charcoal into the watercolor paper. After documenting the charcoal, I would take the painting outdoors and work on it with watercolor paint. The next day I would do a second session with each painting. Using the "dry brush" technique on the previous session would increase the luster, richness of the colors already down, and add more color to areas as needed. While the original sketches are not for sale, these works are available by credit card via PayPal. To see detail photographs of the paintings, click the photograph to go to the watercolor page it is presented on.