I was hoping that the background would finally be dry enough to glaze over a more final color on the portrait of Paul and Mandie. Unfortunately there are a couple of places where the paint was a bit thicker, and now two-weeks on, are still tacky to the touch.
I didn’t really want to move on to more final layers of paint until the background hue and value were set. Humans are really good with objective values but hues are somewhat more subjective and will absolutely change their character depending on the predominate colors around them. I’m sure you’ve experienced the classic case where you put a neutral grey next to a warm color and the grey takes on a cool character. Then you take the same grey and put it next to a very cold color and it feels quite warm. That’s the issue that I wanted to avoid by having the background more or less set before working on the (more important) fleshy bits.
But, as someone very wise once said, “you can’t always get what you want.” What I needed though was a full day of painting and most of those are only available to me on weekends. So I decided to throw caution to the wind and hope for the best. Now to see if that decision will come back to haunt me.
That said, I’m really happy with the modeling on this one so far.
