Naked Art Work progress of artist Kevin Clark

It seems what I gained in Thursday’s productivity was lost yesterday and today. Friday started fine, with painting more details in the hair and skirt, and then painting the feather duster. I had been wondering what method to use for the stockings. Airbrushing is my common way, since it creates a nice subtle texture that differs from the skin in the end. But I had already removed all the masking, I hadn’t cut pieces to go around the stockings only. So, I foolishly thought I could get away with painting it. There isn’t that much detail, so if I applied the gouache in a watery layering method, it should work. I should know better by now that me and paint (on anything besides small detail areas) no longer work well together. I still don’t know why things go as bad as they do, but they continue to do so each and every time. This time, I couldn’t get it to blend well enough, so I added more paint, but that made a bigger mess. I ended up covering both legs in a flat skin tone and let it dry. I figured I could still salvage it by airbrushing over it. I cut new masking, then began airbrushing acrylic over the gouache. The gouache dried darker than I wanted (at least for the light areas) so I needed to get the acrylic fairly solid over it to bring it up. Well, the airbrush mix was too watery and began to run down the masking. I blotted best I could, but it wasn’t drying all too fast on the board either. I think the gouache beneath held some of the water instead allowing it to dry. I consider that an odd thing though, since when I typically paint with gouache, it dries before I can get more than an inch of paint on an area. The paint gods are having quite the laugh at my expense, it seems.
So, I finish the airbrushing, but it’s not looking right at all. And to worsen things, when I remove the masking, it pulls up some paint (lucky it’s not strong enough to pull paper, too!). There also was some leaking beneath the edges of the masking, so that’s going to be a bit of work to fix.
My only choice now is to color the legs with oil pastels, so I paint on the textured gesso over them (and cover all the skin areas as well)…

Today, I got going on the oil pastels, starting at the top (head) and working down, section by section. For the skin areas, I used colored pencils for the color and then oil pastels to blend. For the stockings though, since they already had a dark base now. I went directly with the oil pastels. This also should give them a slightly different color palette than the skin, and hopefully keep them looking like stockings and not just bare legs.
Before I could finish today, though, the paint came back to haunt me once more. I had blocked off the feet with masking (I couldn’t reuse the masking from yesterday, as that stuff was ruined) to protect the white of the shoes from the pastels. As I peeled them off, the left foot pulled up the paint and gesso from the stocking area of the foot. I’ve cleaned it off and re-applied the gesso, but I’ll have to wait until tomorrow now to get the pastels on there.
Otherwise, all the skin and stocking areas are now covered, and I can get to the detailing tomorrow (hopefully finishing the whole piece)…