2 Experiments

Right now i am working on 2 new paintings. Since they are both done in layers I am working on one while the other is drying.

The first one was inspired by these paintings by Bougeureau:

This is my sketch

This is what I aspire to

If you cant see from the poor quality photo, my poor girl has fungus growing on her body. Specifically this one

yellow brain fungus

I am trying a technique used by many of the old masters called gisaille ( gray in French). They would do almost the entire painting using only black and white to get all the values correct and then add transparent glazes for color. Here is an example

This is what I have so far:

At the rate I'm going I will probably be done in a couple of years.

progress as of 10/2013

Part 2

This is the other one. This technique is called the "mische technique" or "mischtechnik". In brief, it uses alternating layers of oil paint and egg tempera hence mische or "mixed'. Others have gotten some pretty nice results this way. The artist Brigid Marlin seems to be the queen. Here is some of her stuff:

If you want to learn more about it you can visit her website http://www.brigidmarlin.com/Pages/Mische.html

The idea is to use the way the brain sees to create richer colors, theoretically by painting separate color layers and then adding details with the egg tempera something like a color separation in printing. so this is what I got so far.

reference photo

ink drawing with red over it

added yellow then egg tempera with blue over it

I neglected to take pictures or the stage in between where I painted white egg tempera over the red for highlights and then painted a layers of yellow, but you get the idea.

Next comes more refinement of the highlights and then there are a couple of ways to go. i think i will try putting local color glazes on each area like this artist http://www.madelinevonfoerster.com/technique.html.