alphabet in progress, 3

wet the violin body and added one last wash of wr/bs. Leave to dry.

 Wet the sound hole, drop in indanthrene and paynes grey. That fixed my "mistake" . Wet the top shadow of the fingerboard and painted it with an indanthrene/aliz crimson mix, dropping in some burnt sienna. Wet the lower plate and drop in the ib/ac mix only. That's because it is a plate, not a shadow! Let it dry.

 Paint the shadow to the bridge and the string shadows.
Wet the area of the shadow - but also the back of the bridge, then wash with a dark sticky mix of ib/ac and drop in some sticky mix of bs.
Drop in and walk away!
Leave the paint to mingle to produce interesting shadows. Use a few flicks for string shadows.
Let it dry

 Remove the masking on the strings.
From here there's a bit of tidying up to do to make the strings look neater. Some dry brush in sepia on the curve, then she'll be done!

 Next time you see the violin , it will be the finished picture. I hope you've enjoyed the step by step process.

alphabet in progress, 2

Here's the next stages:

wet the sound hole areas and drop in some indanthrene blue and paynes grey

These are the colour mixes I'll be using on the body of the violin. I find it useful to paint swatches on a strip before I start to put in large washes on the painting.

Mix up two washes in preparation. Raw umber and burnt sienna, then winsor red and burnt sienna.
Wet the violin body, leaving the finger plate dry. Wash the ru/bs mix all over the wet area, then drop in some of the wr/bs mix in places where the violin would naturally be darker. The bridge, the curve, the bottom mid of the painting. Leave to dry.

On the bridge and the lines of the curve,  paint in a  second wash of the wr/bs mix and leave to dry.

Paint a third and last wash of wr/bs mix on the bridge and this time on all of the curve and let these dry.

Now, those of you who know violins will probably have spotted that I've made a mistake here. For some unknown reason, I overlooked painting the mid section of the sound hole on the left. Probably because the crop split it in three and I wasn't paying enough attention as I worked out colours.

It enables me to give you a great lesson that I have learned  - and that is "never panic" 
Leave the area alone to dry and later on we can fix it.

I've seen many people who have made a mistake, seen it almost immediately and then straight away dive in and try to rectify it.
Don't do that!
Pound to a penny the painting will be ruined. Let it dry.  Fix it later. 

Which is just what I'll be doing -and hopefully you'll see a great painting still !

An alphabet painting, in progress

Its been such a long time since I've done a step by step post, that I thought I'd do another! Photo courtesy of Morguefile's copyright free photos.

You can follow along or even paint along if you like!
If you do that and finish it, post it on your blog and I'll link to it :)

Either way, I hope you enjoy the following.

First the pencil drawing of the violin

then mask out the strings. I use W&N Masking Fluid, but any rubber mask will do. Its just to resist the paint when you paint the body of the violin, without any fiddly paint all around the strings !

next I'm painting the bottom right corner, which is background to the violin.
Wet the curved corner first, then drop in some alizarin crimson, some burnt sienna and some payne's grey. Leave to dry.

Last for today, wet the whole violin and then drop in - in a random fashion - some new gamboge.  As you can see, I accidentally touched the corner of the background and it flared a little into the violin. Don't worry if that happens. blot it quickly with a dry brush and leave it be. Once overpainted, it will add character to the violin !
You can see I'm from the "don't panic" school of painters :)

Until next time...