Awoke at 1am with stomach pain and sat up to read Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph for two hours. Listened to Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata, which is always a good thing: late night music seems to inject deeply into the unconscious.
I awoke later than I should, feeling more tired and irritable than I should. I didn't really feel like painting, but I know that this is often a good feeling for a work day. The key difference between a professional in a field and a hobbyist is that a professional will do the job whether he or she wants to; tick tick, by wage clock, the job is there to do so must be done whether we want to or not. The results are generally irrelevant to how I feel, but I think that generally, the results are better when I don't want to paint or am in a low mood. A happy mood lends itself to being carefree. Self-critique is vital, as is moving at the correct speed, better slow than fast.
I started the Lachesis glazing with the face, the key part of the painting. I wanted to do this first because it needs the most care and focus, and I was least happy with this in the underpainting. I reminded myself how much I hate this canvas surface. It feels too chalky. Most canvases have lots of pits, this one has bobbles. The glazing was very smooth though. This made me think that surfaces are divided on ease of smoothing and ease of detail. A smooth panel is good for detail but difficult to produce a smooth, jewelled finish. This canvas does smooth really easily, but detail was more difficult.
Here is the figure in the underpainting:
And here today, after glazing:
Caucasian flesh tones can be painted by either underpainting in reds/pinks and glazing in yellows, or underpainting in yellows and glazing in pinks (or anything else, of course - such as Michelangelo's flesh over green). Dali advocated a Venetian Red underpainting in 50 Secrets, perhaps because his Leda Atomica (his latest masterpiece at the time of his writing) was clearly painted like this. Of course, over his long career he painted all ways. I prefer reds over yellows because the transparent reds are prettier than transparent yellows (well, this is debatable), but also because yellow is a secondary colour, and red a primary, and painting in layers is best when moving from tertiary to secondary to primary.
The space background is very dark, a case in point, it is ink-black, actually violet over blue, so it looks very blue, and the drapery very red. Filters tend towards primary colours, but the top layer also reflects (these effects can't be seen on a mere photograph). Here, unusually, I've used silver paint for the stars, which gives the sky a cosmic and magical air, matching the themes of gods and universal order. You'll note that I've changed the hair radically; the first was too dark and lit from the top left, as in the Waterhouse painting from which I took the pose. I decided to redo this as lit from below like the face, glazing very delicate light tones over near black is not easy. I've added some gold paint in the hair, ideal for a goddess. These ultra-fine strands look rather spectacular, every bit as fine as the rays in a van Eyck.
