I feel like I’ve gone a little bit bezerk with the masking fluid today :-). I thought I’d begin a painting of the giant wave straight away, while the subject is still fresh and appealing to me, so I spent this afternoon sketching a light outline and saving some white areas with masking fluid. The paper is quite a bit larger than my original sketch so there’s hopefully room to see the facial features more clearly. It’s also a different shape so I made up a bit of sandy beach in the near foreground and a glimpse of sky at the top.
The masking was actually great fun to apply: usually it’s a bit of a chore, you can hardly call it painting, but today felt quite creative – I splashed it, dripped it, poured it on and pushed the pools of masking around with the back of a pencil! I’m very interested to see whether it works for the picture or not. I feel this area will need several layers to get anything like the right effect, so I suspect the masking may come off again tomorrow, perhaps more will go on, maybe not 😛
I also had lots of ideas for how to paint the sea and the crashing wave, but they all disappeared the moment I sat down and dipped a brush in water! I can see it’s going to take patience and imagination to make it work and I’m already silently hitting myself for wondering if I’ve started out right… the ‘good’ me is telling myself it doesn’t matter at this stage, anything can be worked upon or even taken out again – that side is trying hard to silence the regular me who’s whispering ‘the sea’s too dark already and why did you choose to use that blue?’