Terry MellwayMasquerade cont’d….
I’m very partial to redheads (like me) so I decided to give her red hair. Once I did that I realized that the yellow flower I had introduced looked too garish so I changed it up a bit to have it tie in with her hair and balance the two sides. What was really strange about this is that yellow and purple are compliments of each other but in this case the yellow flower next to the purple mask looked terrible. This is really a good lesson for anyone, especially if you are working from a reference photo – remember that what you see is not always the right way to go. I have no reference photo for this piece but my gut instinct said the yellow had to go an in spite of the three Mardi Gras colours being yellow, green and purple. I’ve been tweaking little things as I go, crisping up found edges, deepening tones etc. Now I’m working on the big fluffy feathers at the top. I’ve chosen to do some of them in a pale lavender and some will probably be green. Can’t make up my mind yet on the rest of the mask and the details on it. I did try doing some Krackle work on a piece of the same paper I’m using by putting down a very dark umber and then applied a fairly thick layer of Krackle compound. After 2 days of drying it crackled up nicely but the spaces were very small and it buckled the paper so I won’t do this technique on the mask unless I simply draw it in to look like a crackled area. So that’s up in the air yet. Hope you enjoy this installment.
Terry Mellway 