So today I tried out various mediums to find which will be the best one for this new project. One I didn’t mention last night is oil paint. I figured I’d try them out, just to see. I don’t like the colors I mixed for ‘peach’ flesh, plus it’s a little tricky to blend with the limited brushes I have in the studio. If the blue moves into the peach, there’s very little I can do to bring the color back. Overall, I’m not liking that one.
Next was airbrushing. Without mixing a dozen variants, it looks rather flat and dull. It’s easy to do though, and of course blends smoothly. If I were to use this, I’d need to under-paint it, or at least use pencils to build up the details.
And finally there was oil pastels. I created a grid to compare various mixes of colored pencils with oil pastels. It looks like the blue oil pastels work well on their own, not needing the pencils for enhancement. They seem opaque as well, so that’s hopeful. Mixing into the peach can still be tricky, but I’m much more adept at controlling them, so it shouldn’t get out of hand. I still have the issue of hair hanging over the skin, so either I’ll need to paint the hair with pastels, or I can try to match the skin color in paint and blend the pastels into that paint.
What I may do is airbrush a base, then gesso on top of that, using oil pastels for the final layer. This will also help if it would turn out any of the oil pastels are not as opaque as I had thought. If I mix the paint right, I might be able to paint the hair on with gouache/watercolors, and leave an edge around them to blend the oil pastels. This is what I do on most of my recent pieces, the only difference is the blue skin in this one.
Now that I have a plan in mind, I can get started on actually working on it. Tonight I’ll mask it out and try to get a base color into the background.