This piece is for sale. You can email your inquiries to cooey2ph@yahoo.com.
See, I've been rushing a miniature army of dwarves and orcs since the Holy Week and I'm 60% done. So, I ended up painting some bits here and there before lunch time. Come 1pm, I was focusing on the painting already. I've been working on acrylics and decided to glaze over the darker parts of the painting with crimson and a mix of ultramarine and umber. Now the thing with acrylics is that even though they're less messier then oil paints, they dry very fast. Moreso in a hot and humid environment. Which was exactly what my garage was this afternoon. In the end, I was making breakneck decisions like what color goes where and how the light carved the woman's body shapes and trying to beat the drying time of the paint for a more tonal blend. I'm more of an illustrator and the use of the line was a hard habit to break. I managed to blur out my lines with gratituous blending and rendered 2 or 3 brushes permanently damaged.
While rendering the woman, I got to thinking that the whole piece was a bit ho-hum. Yeah, so there was this naked lady with her boob hanging out but it seriously lacked a story (Okay, a boob hanging out is a story for me but...) So, what story did this woman have to tell? She's kneeling on the floor, naked. Her arms resting on a batibot chair and deep in sleep with a towel under her arms. Then it hit me -- the towel was the key! I rerendered the lighting to throw the focus more on the towel with half-legible letters alluding to the infamous pinoy "good morning" towels -- a mainstay of cheap motels and taxi rooms.
So here's the story --- she was a lady of the night and after a tough night of playacting and emotionless, dirty "wham-bang-thankyou-ma'am" quickies, she falls asleep with the towel just as the sun starts to rise. When she wakes up, the towel will help her clean-up the detritus of the evening and let her live a normal life -- until the next evening.
Come dinner time, I had a chance to step back and look at the painting and felt that it looked too clean. Although the composition of the torso, thighs and arms framed the towel, I still couldn't get the feeling of it being the critical key in "cleansing" one's self. So I did the unthinkable. I took a page from most of my digital work and introduced a rough texture on both sides of the frame, acting as asymmetrical pillars as well as alluding to the dirty and grimy evening she just had. After a few hits and misses, I managed to come up with something I'm pleased with. With the help of my sister-in-law Iya, a roll of masking tape and some premixed diluted acrylic washes, I approximated my digital work's textural quality. It looked like you were peeking at her through a thin colored curtain, with the sunlight being captured in the folds and "dirtying up" some of here body parts. Click here for work-in-progress pics
So there. That's her story. Here's the painting. Enjoy.
The original article regarding this piece was posted in multiply. since I've stopped using that site, I'm reposting my WIP notes here after the jump.
Posted Apr 16, '09 10:13 AM
It's summer! I'm currently working on an acrylic painting in my garage where it gets too darn hot during the afternoons. The painting's on a 24"x24" canvas. I've just started the underpainting and have just begun blocking out the highlights.
I used a warm sienna, burnt umber and crimson for the underpainting. As you can see on the pictures, some parts such as the nipples have just been simply blocked out with color without any detailing yet. I took the pictures with a flash and the flares hit the color on the nipples-- making them more exaggerated. Yeah, right.
Opinions are welcome, I have to finish this in two days for submission to a local show at the GMA office. The department's heading for the beach and we're raising funds for the trip with an art exhibit featuring paintings from the art directors. Wish me luck!
Posted Apr 19, '09 11:00 AMIt's 10pm in the evening and I am done with the painting. I started working at around ten this morning but I "technically" slapped paint on the canvas after a delicious lunch of dory fillet & ginataang kalabasa. It was the dogs' fault. And the dwarves. And orcs. Tons of 'em. Really. Click here to see the album as well as my work areas.
See, I've been rushing a miniature army of dwarves and orcs since the Holy Week and I'm 60% done. So, I ended up painting some bits here and there before lunch time. Come 1pm, I was focusing on the painting already. I've been working on acrylics and decided to glaze over the darker parts of the painting with crimson and a mix of ultramarine and umber. Now the thing with acrylics is that even though they're less messier then oil paints, they dry very fast. Moreso in a hot and humid environment. Which was exactly what my garage was this afternoon. In the end, I was making breakneck decisions like what color goes where and how the light carved the woman's body shapes and trying to beat the drying time of the paint for a more tonal blend. I'm more of an illustrator and the use of the line was a hard habit to break. I managed to blur out my lines with gratituous blending and rendered 2 or 3 brushes permanently damaged.
While rendering the woman, I got to thinking that the whole piece was a bit ho-hum. Yeah, so there was this naked lady with her boob hanging out but it seriously lacked a story (Okay, a boob hanging out is a story for me but...) So, what story did this woman have to tell? She's kneeling on the floor, naked. Her arms resting on a batibot chair and deep in sleep with a towel under her arms. Then it hit me -- the towel was the key! I rerendered the lighting to throw the focus more on the towel with half-legible letters alluding to the infamous pinoy "good morning" towels -- a mainstay of cheap motels and taxi rooms.
So here's the story --- she was a lady of the night and after a tough night of playacting and emotionless, dirty "wham-bang-thankyou-ma'am" quickies, she falls asleep with the towel just as the sun starts to rise. When she wakes up, the towel will help her clean-up the detritus of the evening and let her live a normal life -- until the next evening.
Come dinner time, I had a chance to step back and look at the painting and felt that it looked too clean. Although the composition of the torso, thighs and arms framed the towel, I still couldn't get the feeling of it being the critical key in "cleansing" one's self. So I did the unthinkable. I took a page from most of my digital work and introduced a rough texture on both sides of the frame, acting as asymmetrical pillars as well as alluding to the dirty and grimy evening she just had. After a few hits and misses, I managed to come up with something I'm pleased with. With the help of my sister-in-law Iya, a roll of masking tape and some premixed diluted acrylic washes, I approximated my digital work's textural quality. It looked like you were peeking at her through a thin colored curtain, with the sunlight being captured in the folds and "dirtying up" some of here body parts. Click here for work-in-progress pics
So there. That's her story. Here's the painting. Enjoy.