Fingerpainting Lifedrawing

Today in Lifedrawing we used acrylic paint to produce lifedrawing sketches in the style of Jenny Saville paintings.

This was the first Jenny Saville piece that I decided to influence. I chose it because the colour pallette stood out to me, particularly how the colours gave effect: the soft blue hues contrasting with the bold pinks and reds gives the painting atmosphere and mood.

First I got my initial acrylic colours. To influence this painting, I picked white, magenta, blue and teal for my basic colours. The aim was to do a unique sketch but influence the style of another piece. For mine, I sketched the angular shapes in pencil in my sketchbook and mesaured with my ruler for juxtaposing features of the face to make it realistic. This is my completed face:

To complete the painting itself, I used my fingers as a tool. I first covered the area with white emulsion thickly and gradually built up tones by mixing my colours together and making bold lines and then going over this again to soften the colour and also give a sense of blending. It took me a while to get a grasp of the technique, as on the blue side I made the colours too strong so it looked too messy; however by the end (the neck), I managed to get used to it as I could blend colours effectively. On its own it looks quite scary in my opinion but when compared with the original painting I think it was a good interpretation.

This is the second Jenny Saville piece I selected. It is a photographic piece but I thought it would be challenging task because it is a lot of similar tones merged together.

When composing my sketch, I again started with rough pencil guide lines to get the shape of the head right. I didn't manage to finish it, but I think it looks good so far:

I used yellow, red, white and burnt sienna paint to begin with. I started to map out shapes such as the cheek to gain a suished up effect like the original. I again painted a base white layer and then built up the shades from darkest to lightest so that it was easy to blend together. Compared to the original, my image favours oranges as opposed to browns. I did use brown but there wasn't much. I think this painting is successful although it is unfinished at the moment.

I enjoyed doing the fingerpainting because it allowed me to understand Saville's work more and I liked getting messy.