The background is a shade of mushroom, overlaid with a stencil pattern in turquoise, teal, and green and then knocked back with another thinned-out coat of a blue-green mix. I drew the figure, and then looked at Malcolm's pieces for inspiration. I had a false start when I first did all the shadows in shades of red oxide, cobalt violet, and raw umber, as I would normally do, and then tried to incorporate the other colors as well—it looked like a big messy mash-up of two separate people's styles, which indeed it was! So I blocked out all the browns and purples and replaced them with a mix of Payne's Grey and Ultramarine Light, and suddenly the rest of the colors popped out in a completely different way. It also made the hair, which is the only thing left in the red-brown spectrum, stand out, as redheads always should!
I wasn't brave enough, as it turned out, to make as much use of Malcolm's greens and turquoises as I originally intended, but...stages. And admittedly, I can't duplicate his glinting paint and popping white highlights, but that's partly due to medium (acrylics instead of oils) and mostly due to the substrate (birch board). The tradeoff for me is, I like the scrubby blended look you can get by painting on wood with a grain.
The shirt (or dress) she was wearing was black with white polka dots, but it was so folded and creased and gathered by being pushed down off her shoulders that the prospect of painting all those full dots, half dots, and quarter dots, as well as capturing highlights and shadows, became too fussy (and too daunting). So I elected to make her clothing a dramatic dark teal to go with the background shades, and then put in lights by adding Ultramarine Light to the teal, and the shadows by adding Payne's Grey, which also gave it unity with her skin tones.
The pose, with the tilted-up chin, and the configuration of her hand were challenging, but I think I mostly captured it. This is "Warm and Cool"—stencils and acrylics on thin birch board, 12x16 inches. (I don't love this title, so if you have a better suggestion, put one forth!)
This is the same model that I used for my "Surf the World" painting back in 2022. I still have a follow-up painting I want to do to go with that one, but it's a tall canvas (full-length standing figure) and I can't do it at my desk, so it may have to wait for an easel, which could be a while (nowhere to put it at the moment).
