Gini Lawson

“Carving back”

This little boy’s face had grown too long, so I needed to do what I call, “carving back,” meaning using the background or adjacent color to reduce the mass of the face. (Or nose, or hand, or whatever – everything tends to grow in paintings.)

This first image shows the older boy’s face at the end of a vigorous session – note the length of his lower face, from bottom lip to chin:

The next photo shows his face after I’ve carved away at it, reshaped it using the adjacent colors. you’ll notice that this also takes years off his face – the longer face looked much older:

The lesson? Nothing is straightforward. There is no formula, there is no ONE way to do things, there is no step-by-step method that is going to give you the results you want. And you will NEVER get the results you want if you can’t accept that.

Posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2012 at 5:00 pm. Filed under: A Day's Work, Painter's process, Paintings in progress RSS 2.0 feed.