Luminosity
Acrylic on canvas
150 X 200 cm
may - June 09


For this painting i wanted a harsh lighting coming from the side to bleach out the one side of the face, i hoped it would create better tonal ranges. think it worked, ( was also the first photograph i took with my new lighting, a real quick snap shot to see how it worked in an image )

At the moment i am enjoying making these monochromes and looking for shape and form through the tonal variations. This One was made a bit different to my last few, theres hardly any paint brush at all on this one. Its all airbrush and pencils, probs 60% airbrush, 35 % pencil and 5% paintbrush.

Its also made through a different method of painting for me, and a technique i call a reductive method. most artists start working light and then work the darker tones over, i did the opposite and used the daker tones first then went into the image with lighter ones, each shade of grey tone getting lighter and lighter than the previous untill i'm using pure white to paint with. For me this helped with covering the image totally in layers of paint which helps with the ultra smooth finish to the work.

in total 6 weeks painting, still got to put couple layers of Satin varnish on though.

please let me know what you think and many thanks for looking.