'Dove Love' a painting about Ritual.

When the June Monthly Painters Challenge was announced by Tracey Fletcher King, I racked my brain for a week or two about how I was going to interpret and paint RITUAL.  Like Alice Jones, I goggled ritual to get the ball rolling and the ideas flowing. The word ceremony stuck out for me and I knew I wanted to paint a hand in this months challenge piece (because I had not tackled a hand before). Amended: I had not tackled a hand in Oils, I totally forgot about the watercolour figurative work I did over a year ago. Darn my Goldfish memory. You can see them all in this post.  So with lots of thoughts running through my head my June painting slowly emerged as a rather ambiguous interpretation of ritual, a lady holding a dove.

It's still a little wet in places, I went back into it this morning to do so more detailing before uploading the image onto the MPC facebook page.  Pop on over to the page and have a look at this album, the other seven artists are also uploading their work today. I will do a blog post on all of the work when it's all in later today.  Here are some details of the image.

 

 

I was having trouble with painting this hand, as with all things that one has not tackled before, many issues arose, mostly to do with proportions. A couple of days ago this hand was going drastically wrong, fortunately my good friend Lisa offered to be my hand model and I took photos of her in the same pose with the same side lighting and that helped out heaps. I also watched many Youtube videos on drawing hands (because videos on painting the hand do not seem to exist) and I also looked at some of my favorite artists and how they paint hands. I will do a Link Love post in the next few days covering painting hands.

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