Thursday, 01-Sep-11 08:33:00 CEST

A naked man in the moonlight

The teacher Iwona at de Kuntslinie was adding additional challenges step by step, especially regarding material and the number of colors to use in each drawing. It is obviously much more fun to start directly with fifteen color’s but then you soon get lost into other things than representing form and textures and really looking at the motive. I liked this approach.

This evening Iwona had promised we were about to paint with acrylic paint and I think that many of the people in the group thought that we would get 15 colors to use. I even think I thought so. Now in retrospect I realize how carefully Iwona had figured out how to add challenges slowly. There were standing four cans of acrylic paint waiting for us. Four is not bad at all! Then Iwona started to explain what we would do and then she surprised us by telling us that all of us had to choose white and black. Then there was a brown and a blue and we had to choose one of them.

I went for blue. This evening we had a male nude model and the next week we would have a female dressed model. I was thinking that I prefer female models before male and I like warm colors more than cold colors so if I used the blue for the man and the brown color for the female next week then it would become really good.

So here is the male model painted completely naked and he is painted with the blue acrylic paint. I used an enormous paper. The paper size is called A0. That is 841mm wide and 1189mm high. That is equal to 16 A4 papers. Almost 16 letter sized papers. I was standing there painting as if it was a wall.

When I took a couple of steps back to view the result I got a bit annoyed about the blue. The others in the group made jokes about Smurfs. This was huge so that could not be a smurf. Also smurfs have their pants on and this model was butt naked. I had to think about this and after some time I knew what this was:

A naked man in the moonlight.