Works in Progress

I'm taking a break from my couple embracing and using that style to paint my other charcoal sketches. These two teal canvas are works in progress, and are stuck in the 'what do I do now' stage. Both are based on the same charcoal drawing and focused on capturing movement. After painting my first red painting I looked at both Klimt 'The Kiss' and at the work of Giacomo Balla whose work has inspired me in these paintings.

This was the first attempt at paining the crowd in the same style as my couple and is the outcome of some experimentation. I first started off with just black guidelines and a grey background on which I then added more expressive darker grey paint strokes over the black guidelines, however, that quickly became messy, so in an attempt to clean the painting up I smoothed out the dark grey and painted a section of the canvas that colour, this did two things, it covered up my very dull and badly painted background and gave me inspiration. I then mixed up 3 different shades and painted block shapes to form my background. I then focused on painting back over my guidelines I originally painted and in the end used a palette knife to create some texture.  In this photo is is hard to see the differences between the shades of the background so I may paint over them to create more difference and intensify the colours.

This is the smaller canvas, around the size of a fat A4 piece of paper. With the smaller canvas I feel I can use my Brusho varnish mixture, as on a bigger canvas it would shine too much and be just, well, just too much, but on the smaller canvas it looks nice and creates an intense section. The Brusho mixtures is a nice way to build up subtle layers to show movement which washes of paint just can't quite do, I think it is because thin washes of paint are too thin the brush mixture is thin yet stickier and doesn't bleed unlike washes. Looking at this photo now I feel that either the bottom left corner is to dark or the bottom right corner is to light.