Studio practice

Shadow layering   

Looking back this is where I should have just left these paintings alone and started another but I didn't. I had this idea of layering more shadows over the paintings, I had already used the windowsill shadows from my home so liked the idea of layering over shadows from another place I spend a lot of time, the college studio. I think this idea could have been really good but I just didn't execute it in the quite right or maybe it would have been better as a separate piece altogether. The studio was pretty sunny so it didn't take long to find two good window shadows, I made up a mixture of very watery white acrylic paint so I could achieve an opaqueness to the brush strokes. I propped the paintings against the shadows and repeated the same method id used for the underpaintings, using very gentle brushstrokes as not to distorted the shadows. After the white layer had dried I took both paintings outside and put down a coat of thick clear varnish over only the white parts to create more life and texture to the white shadow.

Honestly as soon as id layered the white lines of the shadow over the paintings I kind of knew straight away I didn't really like how it looked but decided to keep pushing through with them to see if it could grow to something I did actually like.