The Forum's Art Museum

[moredhel]

as it is the spooky season I tried to make a spooky watercolor

[Jitter]

Ouch! You did! Moredhel, this is great both in idea and in execution.

[moredhel]

Thank you.

[wavewright62]

Holy smokes, look at that!  You m'dear are developing some mad skills to match your vision.  The brown eyes really draw you into the image.

[moredhel]

Painting eyes is fun

[dmeck7755]

moredhel,
Just wow. 

[moredhel]

Thank you

[tehta]

Wow, very striking! But I am most impressed by the shading. Skin shadows are so hghvhj.
You could consider a job as one of those recreate-face-from-skull artists...

[moredhel]

I did the inverse trying to reconstruct the skull from the face and there is no need for this skill.

The shading comes nearly automatically (at least it feels like this) with my layer by layer method of painting skin. In the first step I just paint it all with yellow ochre.



Next I add red on top (I prefer venetian red but almost any red will work)



here the shadows get 1 or 2 extra layers of red.

in the final step I put some raw umber into the most intense parts of the shadows.

.

Can be done rather quickly (took 3 lunch breaks of 30 minutes in this case including palette and brush cleaning) and I like the look of the result.

[Buteo]

The result is stunning!

I've noticed this in an artist's description of how they make an image: "I started with this, then added some of that, and some of the other..."
What blows us non-artists away is how you know just where to put how much of whatever. I know there's a large element of practice in an artist's skill, but a result as effective as this is still wonderful to the beholder!

[moredhel]

What blows us non-artists away is how you know just where to put how much of whatever.

I used a reference Image so I could just see how dark and light the areas of the image should be.

As you ça see Here https://www.instagram.com/p/CwQ4QGiAZk-/ it is not copied very exactly but it does look human enough.

[wavewright62]

(And sometimes you go, whoopsie! that didn't work!, put it away, come back later and look at it with fresh eyes, say, hey, that's actually not a bad effect...)

What I find interesting is that I assumed the intense borders were an afterthought to clean up edges or hide a bit that didn't work, but the process image clearly shows that's not the case.  So extra bravo, as that really visually sproiks the intensity of the horror.

[moredhel]

(And sometimes you go, whoopsie! that didn't work!, put it away, come back later and look at it with fresh eyes, say, hey, that's actually not a bad effect...)

As we learned from the great Bob Ross 'we don't make mistakes those are happy little accidents'.

[wavewright62]

His memory surely is a blessing.

[moredhel]

As I was massively reminded by the halloween picture and the reference of a famous work, and nobody besides seemed to see it, I painted a version where it should be visible.