Thank you, friends, for your kind words.
The painting took more time than usual but there were a few 'firsts' (to me any way) on this particular figure.
1. The groundwork. For once I decided to make a more elaborate groundwork. Guy Bibeyran's splendid article in the new Figurines was timely and very welcome of course. Guy Bibeyran also sent me the flowers
(real miniature dried heather, just waiting to be painted). Calvin Tan supplied the rest of the vegetation. Thanks, Calvin!
2. The skin tones. Apart from a few exceptions, I've always used warm skin tones on my other figures. On this one, I decided on using cold tones overall to convey the moist and icy atmosphere. My mentor NC Wyeth came to the rescue with several of his paintings (notably 'Billy Bones'). The result is that the colour mixes for the skin on this figure were drastically different from what I was used to, mainly grey, violet and sepia. Plus some viridian to spice up the greys.
3. The tartan. This is my first tartan. Hopefully there was no definite sett in the period of the figure (early 1700). So I created a simple, rudimentary design that looked pleasing to me and started to paint. It's NOT all that difficult. The trick is to break the 'complex' multi-coloured design in several simple single colour ones. I've taken in-progress pictures for a quick s-b-s in case you're interested.
I wanted a dramatic sky backdrop to add to the atmosphere. A picture from a library book about the weather came to the rescue. And voilà!
Q.
