Get Your Jazz or Should I say Rock Hands Ready!

It was time I got hands on with my painting (I will now stop the silly hand puns) and took some time to actually paint with a paintbrush. I started out by just painting what I saw so using the photograph posted in the last post of my friends hands I sat down to tame the chaos.

Painting hands is hard. I hated it last year when I was painting a long pose but then I had the rest of the body to occupy peoples attention, this was just the hands. Hands are a pain to paint for a number of reasons; 1) the proportions are hard to get right 2) fingers aren't sausages but neither are they lumpy bumpy shapes 3) after staring at hands for a long period of time they start to look really freaky. I did some sketches of the hands before I started on my canvas which helped and then used the paint to add more dimension.

 I used the same paints as the paint party for the paint splashes and am happy with how they turned out. Skin tone is always hard to get and I forgot when I paint I tend to work with pale high contrast colours so the hands are a little neon but I like the contrast with grey and the paint on the fingers. The hands truly stand out. The only problem, apart from the shape of the thumb on the right and the ring finger on the left, is whether or not I should have left the hands floating on the canvas as they are? As it is the painting looks like either a horror film cover or record cover art. However, as observation painting it's not bad.

This painting was an experiment  I drew around my own hands and then using Winsor&Newton Modelling Paste and a palette knife filled in my hands shapes, the two hands at the bottom of the canvas in the foreground, to use arty words, had two layers of the modelling paste to make them stand out more. The paste as a matt effect so when I painted over it not only did I get a nice smudged dry brush affect but the acrylic also dried matt instead of shiny. I then added the metallic paint over the tops in random areas using quick brush strokes to avoid over analysis and controlled movement. I also flicked some paint onto the canvas. I think this has captured the lights at a gig quite well but it is a little messy technically and composition wise. It was a good experiment and I might use elements in my work later on and it has told me I need to work bigger.

Next challenge work bigger and better!