The legs are beginning to take their place, presenting a number of corrections to the structures that are immediately behind them. I’ve drafted the outlines of the top leg and sketched the bottom edge of it; tomorrow I hope to get the bottom one sketched in with the supporting hands and to work on the Empress’ dress.
I got into building some ribbon-like pieces behind a large belt with buckle at the waist of the first girl on the right, getting me daydreaming about designing a harness for wings for her, like my friend and colleague Dru Pagliassotti’s heroine in her Steampunk novel Clockwork Heart. If I do so, it will have to follow considerable work on the sky.
I’m thoroughly enjoying the fabric. It’s particularly good fun to invent folds and ribbons for the figures to wear, so I’ll continue doing this with the other girls.
I’ve read through the book about Pre-Raphaelite techniques, which is a serious piece of work describing paintings that have been analyzed using x-rays, ultraviolet, chemistry and historic records, including the archives from the art store used by most of these Victorian painters. It’s a fascinating account if you enjoy such minutia. I’ve really enjoyed it, particularly the more personal details that are included in a few descriptions of the artists at work. I’d have liked to have see more anecdotal information about how the painters worked; their approach to the compositions and their choice of brushes.
It was reassuring to find out that they generally used copal (a resinous drier not unlike the walnut alkyd I use) and curious that they liked Zinc White, although even in their own lifetimes they discovered that this is not a good choice for paintings that one might want to last for any length of time because the paint cracks up readily, causing damage to the surface of the painting. I wonder if it was simply exciting to use a new pigment? When the Pre-Raphs were at their peak Winsor and Newton had come up with a new process for creating Zinc oxide that had not been used before.
It was also reassuring to learn that they weren’t supermen, sometimes redrawing their work because they were dissatisfied with their compositions, even throwing away or abandoning paintings that didn’t go well.
Painting wet white is noted, but the writers don’t describe the technique, presumably because they’re not painters. I’m finding it pretty easy to imitate in the studio and I like the soft blends it gives me. So far I’ve only used it en grisaille (actually en brun), but I’m sure it’s equally effective as a method for rendering colour into areas of the work like dresses or foliage.
Because I don’t think the fist shapes of the hands of the first attendant on the right are particularly graceful, I’m altering them to a more delicate, mannered position that I think is more appropriate to the painting. I want the Empress to appear weightless, so the hands that are visible are going to be long-fingered and like those of a ballet dancer.
My withdrawal symptoms have abated, having received four tubes of Foundation white from Steve at Continental, and I’ve put down a layer of dense white over the entire bottom half of the painting, which means that all I need to do to complete basing out the entire painting is to mix an light grey for the sky and sea. I’ve noticed a couple of errors in the arrangement  of the walls that I want to correct, but I’ll wait until this layer is dry before attempting to fix them.
