The last fornight has seen far less drastic decisions and far more detail and “stuff” added to the general environment of this painting. In order to eliminate the sense of spatial sparsity, I had to pick something to plonk in the foreground in the way of foliage. I wasn’t ever 100% happy with the foliage in my original photograph, so instead decided to use reference of J Bastien Lepage (a French painter) who was bloody awesome at turning foreground details in to middle and background brushwork. While I don’t feel like I’ve nailed it anywhere in the arena of Lepage, it has been a valuable learning exercise.

And now for my favourite part of the term: all of my progress shots in one space!

From initial sketches:

… to a full-size painting:

Aaaaaand here’s what I ended up with (which will probably change again before assessment – I can never blog about something without seeing a part of the painting differently and running off to fix it.The latest decisions I am most happy with, are adding some more texture to the sky and warming it up further in the bit closest to the picture plane – I think the top of the painting has a better relationship to the foreground now (before it felt a little disjointed as the tonal transition in the sky was far less drastic than the rest of the painting).

My biggest take-home lesson from this term has been “everything in context”. I now have a greater understanding of how to construct a painting from scratch without an overall reference; and understand how to better translate the information given in photographs to suit their new home in a painting.

Although I feel like this piece is not finished, I will give it a rest now for a few weeks. The girl, the fox and I have had quite the journey together this semester.