Friday, July 15, 2011

'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.



Come visit me on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/tracey.potter.artist

5 comments:

  1. Hands are so tricky Tracey! So for your first time trying them you've done an amazing job! It's so interesting seeing how different all of our paintings are. I love that we have a good mix of styles!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I absolutely looove this painting Tracey, it's so pretty!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks!

    I just realized it's my second time doing hands, about a year ago I did some very small hands in the watercolor 'my little dear". I had totally forgotten.

    Seeing everyone's interpretation is fantastic, there is such a wonderful mix of styles, you are right Jaz. It's great to see all the similarities and differences, it's so inspiring.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Lovely Tracey! Beautiful choice of colours.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Jaz, I went and sourced images of mine with hands only to discover I have done a lot more than I thought, darn my goldfish of a memory.

    ReplyDelete