Fun with paint

Because really, if you're going to do it you might as well have some fun with it.

I paint my sculptures.  It's a habit I picked up while doing a Classics major - sculptures like the Elgin Marbles weren't originally plain white marble; they were painted in bright colours to mimic skin and clothing and they weren't exactly subtle.



Here's a reconstruction of what the Elgin Marbles originally looked like, courtesy of www.macedoniaontheweb.com

                          

So far, however, I haven't really focussed on paintwork here at Seditiosus.  It's been all about the sculpting.  But the other day when I blogged about painting a zombie hand I realised I should focus on paint here more often.

One of the things I'd like to do in this post is give a shout out to metallic paint.  Many artists don't like it or flat out refuse to go anywhere near it, for the not unreasonable reason it looks unbelievably tacky if you slap on a coat of it and call it a day.  I love the stuff, and I consider it to be unfairly maligned.  You can't hold the product responsible for operator error.

This photo shows a glaze made with viridian and bronze acrylic.  The metallic paint isn't the focus at all, it's just there to give the green a slight shimmer.

I used the iridescent wash as a base coat, as you can see in this photo:

It does a great job of highlighting the sculpture's surface texture.  It's also visually interesting because of the way it catches the light.  I was going for "visually interesting" here, but not actually "sparkly", so after it dried I toned it down with a coat of raw umber and then added some lime green speckles.

Here's a close up shot of those speckles:

For me, this qualifies as brightly coloured.  I'm not big on using bright colours generally, but I'm aware that it's possible to do some cool things with them and that I should probably expant my repertoir a bit.  I plan to experiment more with colour in the future.