Chinese White – Painting process
Just finished this today. Below is a quick recap of what I did to paint this. ‘Chinese White’, acrylic and color pencil on wood panel. Click the continue thing below to read the whole article.
So I started with a rough sketch. I was lazy, since I wanted the girl to be pretty symmetrical I just drew half of her. Scanned her into the computer and duplicated it in Photoshop and flipped the duplicate.
I printed out the sketch at the size I wanted the final art to be. I printed it on 2 pieces of paper since my printer only prints at letter size. Just taped the two pieces together.
Ugh. What a mess. I didn’t have any carbon paper so I used vine charcoal to quickly coat the back to transfer the drawing to the board. It worked although it got a bit smudgy. Interestingly, the smudgey bits got removed by the stencils later – I guess the fine dust stuck to the vinyl.
So this is the painting table. I wanted to play with the gold paint again so I just used red, gold and white for the main bits of the painting. I think I used burnt umber for the details on the face. Painting with stencils can be kinda nerve wracking, esepecially since I’m more used to working digitally these days. But I guess that’s half the fun. Anyway the general stencils were cut from film used to wrap books. It’s pretty good but not so great for reuse.
You can see the small stencils I cut for the eyes. I actually painted those in before the white bits. I wasn’t sure if I wanted the skin to be white or brown, the color of the wood. In the end I went with white. I reused the fine stencil cut outs to mask the face details, but some paint seeped through. Partly due to the fact the masks were really small, and partly due to my paint being applied quite thick and liquid. I just touched up the blotches later with a fine brush and brown paint.
The final piece. I added some details to the arms and chest area with color pencils. I’m not a good painter so I find it easier to control shading with color pencils or crayons that I do with paint. I had to recut stencils for some parts to protect the painted areas as I went along. Hopefully other people like the result.
April 7th, 2008 at 11:15 am
Interesting process. I’m already wanting to try some of this at home.
February 17th, 2010 at 11:52 am
This is wonderful. I’m not a painter at all, but I would love to try this. For the past two years I’ve been drawing the same faces over and over again. I should develop that and try something like this.