Painted the Man on the Edge of Emotion Colour study today, I felt too tired for a full day of painting. I used Dali's 'Suburbs Of A Paranoiac Critical Town' as colour inspiration, with a few changes here and there. My painting is suffused with skulls and the desert... more-so than Dali, who was already somewhat ossiphilic. The hard part for me is my face, it's a jumble of shapes in nothingness, like swirling atoms. Is this mostly background? It will be face-like and contain elements of sky and other things too, so mostly painted in situ rather than pre-planned.
The aim of the colour study is to test the overall look and colour balance and is invaluable. There are definite changes and decisions that are made here that would affect the painting detrimentally to do during underpainting itself.
Yesterday I drew out the pencil tone study for the Descartes painting too. This too is very complex, beyond 'colouring in' any lines, but this is fine when a tone guide is there. These two steps; tone study and colour study are so useful and both speed up and improve the actual painting.
