Hand and Foot

I painted this nude yesterday because I was drawn to how her hand and feet came together. I like painting hands and feet and you don’t often find them together, and when you do, they usually aren’t this graceful.

I like painting flesh in watercolor because of the transparent quality of watercolor that allows it to glow (if it works right). This is a very simple painting. The body is only three colors, rose and yellow for the flesh and cobalt blue for the shadows. The background is indigo.
The exact paints are MairemiBlu™ Rose Lake, Daniel Smith™ Hansa Yellow Medium, Windsor Newton™ Cobalt Blue Deep and Daniel Smith™ Indigo. It is painted on Fabriano™ #140.

When I paint nudes, I always start with the flesh because that is what it is all about. My goal is to make it smooth, make it soft (and round) and make it glow. Before I paint, I spend a great deal of time looking at my subject, analyzing the look, the feel, where the shadows fall, the mood of the pose. This was from a black and white photo, and I added the moodiness to soften the feel.

I always mix my flesh colors on the paper (as opposed to on a palette). I find it keeps the colors cleaner and more transparent, and no brushstrokes scratch the surface. I make a very wet puddle of water on the paper where my flesh is going to be. Very wet puddle is pretty vague, but what I mean is that when you hold it up to the light you can clearly see a puddle of water on the surface. Sadly, knowing just exactly when the surface tension is right is a practice thing. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you don’t. When my puddle is “right” I drop some yellow where the light is hitting the subject and drop the rose in the puddle around it. This is where the fun begins. I pick up my paper and tilt it in all directions until the yellow and pink and made a nice fleshy tone. This is the hard part. I wait for it to dry. This is where people get into trouble by not waiting long enough. I, personally, work on three or four paintings at a time to keep myself from getting in there too soon (and to increase my chances of a successful painting experience).

I was pretty happy with my fleshy glow, so I didn’t need to make any repairs there. Whew! I’ve learned that if you don’t have a good glow at the beginning, just start over. It’s only going to lose transparency with each stroke you add to the paper. I next put in my shadows with a blue glaze that I later dropped some rose into for variety. After that dried, I added some rose to the round edges to make them rounder. Then I filled in the background with a pretty dense Indigo and watered it down when I got to the area around her feet. I flushed the paper with water around her feet to create the shadows.

View more of my work at heidiwyckoff.com