My Process: Part Two

When I paint, I will typically use frisket to mask the foreground while I lay in washes for the background. This time, I decided not to use frisket. To keep the color out of the foreground image, I used a wet-into-wet technique. First, I laid down a wash of clean water in the area I was going to paint only. Then I applied paint before the water dried. Some of the fun of wet-into-wet is watching the colors mingle on the paper. Sometimes, you can even help the process along and tilt the paper to affect the direction of the pigment. I knew I wanted the background to be just color and I wanted it to be predominantly cool. So I used a lot of Windsor blue. To make sure I didn't reactivate any of the pigment I put down on subsequent washes, I waited for each wash to dry completely before applying the new one. This method of layering color over the other is called glazing. So after the the first washes of yellow and blue dried, I went over everything with another wash of blue.



Next step, I begin working on the skin tones!