Catching up and Finishing Off

Coming Down to Earth

Good morning everyone. This is the second of the series on angels that I am painting in gouache. Perhaps you may have seen the first one here that I did before Christmas. Actually, I want to point out that I don’t paint these for any religious purpose. But I just love the motif and the opportunity of trying to achieve different light effects. Anyway, I spent some time this week catching up and finishing off several pieces I had on the go. And, in this one, I needed to make the figure look more realistic. ( I’m really missing my Life Drawing practice!) In addition, I experimented with the texture of the feathers, and the golden light effect around the angel.

Meanwhile, I kept thinking about a class I did a couple of weeks ago. In fact, it was very good. Our tutor tried to help us to move away from figurative style into a more abstracted representation. Firstly, we sketched a simple line drawing of a ceramic object. Then, we tried to abstract and exaggerate the features and maybe change the colours.

My first two attempts at abstraction in watercolour

Then we were encouraged to go one stage further and create a completely abstract composition, using the ideas in our previous stages.

My abstract composition

Well this was just the start of my idea, we ran out of time in class. Hopefully, I will get a bit more done in my next catching up and finishing off session!

Let me know what you think !