Start to Finish of "The Sleepover"

I unfortunately forgot to post my process pictures during our last project so instead, I thought it would be fun to do one full progress check/reflection.

Preliminary Sketch

This was the first sketch i finally got correct on the canvas after many tries. I think something I would want to actually calculate the lengths of each square instead of guessing with a random ruler. Some of the boxes were very uneven and that in turn made it difficult to sketch the appropriate proportions in the fingers.

One Hand Done, Blocking The Rest

This was a major jump but I had completed the bottom right hand and was starting to block in the lights and darks of the upper hands and surrounding comforter. Something that isn't shown in this post is fact that I had originally started with a grisaille underpainting for the bottom left hand. This proved to be somehow more difficult than doing the full thing in color. You also may notice that the same hand has interesting proportion. I have never fully drawn hands before, let alone painted any, so this was where I was really getting my footing and experimenting with what works when beginning to paint. What I realized was that in reality I was over complicating it. If you squint at your reference picture, or if you look at it too long, your brain doesn't register that figure as something real. Instead, it recognizes shapes of negative space, shadows, and highlights so all you need to do is focus on the darks and lights and lean more into detail AFTER blocking everything out.

Mostly working on the comforter

When I felt as if the hands were alright for the moment, I started to focus all of my time on the background. In my project my two goals were to work with arbitrary color and to experiment with a different way of incorporating a background into the piece. This comforted simply did the trick. It gave my piece more depth which is what I have also been working on and it allowed me to play around with light and the way my flashlight could ounce off of each fold.

More Comforter work plus highlights

This is obviously a very similar picture but there are some distinct differences. For example, there is a little more paint on the canvas but ALSO the highlights are starting to come out. In this project I really wanted to focus on getting my contrasting values because I haven't quite gotten the hang of it yet. This painting really helped me and made me see that you really do need a strong and interesting light source in order to get those extreme highlights and shadows.

Comforter is finished!

This is obviously a weirdly cropped picture and looks like a time skip but it is very interesting. The comforter was somehow therapeutic in a way which made the painting much more exciting to complete. All that is left are the details!

Everything is filled in

Now everything is finished and this is where I stopped for the night. The piece was a really good way for me to freely explore my goals and the boundaries I could push.

"The Sleepover"

"The Sleepover" is meant to represent the girly sleepovers I had as a kid. Make overs, dress up, talent shows, the like. I wanted to create a mess on the canvas but unfortunately that did not come through at all. In the future I would like to add some splashes of nail polish on the canvas one the paint fully dries.

Paint Palette for the comforter