Painting: Laura and Amelie, live demo

So following on from the previous post, here's the work that I did on the painting during the exhibition. This happened over four days and in front of over 20,000 visitors so no pressure!

Annabel and I set up a painting area within the exhibition. You can see Annabel's quilt on the left there, and mine in the centre of the photo above. We weren't just painting for fun, we were raising money for Save the Children and invited visitors to pop their spare change into a bucket if they liked our work.

Despite the home preparation, at the start of Day 1 it was all looking very blank and a little intimidating. I had some reference photos taped up in my workspace that I could work from and the first stage was to draw in the portraits and block in some tone. 

I painted with Golden Acrylics, both the heavy body and the fluid varieties. As you can see in these photos I also roughed in some flowers in the top right hand corner.

It got pretty busy in the exhibition space and so luckily I had a willing helper who could take over from time to time and give me a break!

I tried to keep the painting quite loose and just focus on finding those lights and darks to try to model the heads as 3D forms. So much easier to say than do!

With the tones established I started to apply some colour. I like painting in thin glazes so it takes quite a few layers to build up the depth that you need.

I mix the acrylics with glaze medium to increase the transparency. I like how this works when painting skin tones as you can build up the work gradually and try to capture some of that translucent quality that skin can have.

The eyes are always fun to do!

On the quilted frame, I kept the painting as loose as possible, taking the cross pattern from the top that Amelie's wearing in the painting out onto the border.

And this is pretty much how it looked by the end, I filled in area behind our heads with seedheads and added loads of layers to the faces and hair.

It was great fun to work at the exhibition. Let's face it, when else do we get 4 days solid to just paint? That's no the end of the story though. Since the exhibition the painting has undergone a bit of a transformation. Come back tomorrow and I'll show you where I'm at with it now.

Thanks for checking in.
Love Laura
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