Phase: 2

Date: September 29, 2005

Description:
The digital camera was in for repairs; consequently I missed the opportunity to take several planned shots. By this point in time many hours have passed. The fiddle was 95% completed, and after that I had moved on to rough in the shirt, jeans, belt and hands. All of this was done against a white background because I wanted to have the fiddle standing out sharply and brightly from the rest of the painting. Painting against a black background would have resulted in a darker, more muted fiddle. But it had reached the point when it was time to add in the black background, because this would affect the rest of the colour scheme. Notice at this point that I have avoided painting the face apart from the initial wash. I usually tackle either the focal point or the most difficult part of a painting first; in this case I chose the focal point, that being the fiddle. I avoided the face because I hadn’t done portraits in quite a while. Notice also how the doorhandle and rope has been left out; watercolour is relatively (but not completely) transparent, and thus I could not paint the doorhandle on top of black but instead had to leave the paper untouched where the doorhandle would later go.