skin to skin

Lock down made me stop my screen print design after having printed my first layer. I ended up with 14 copies of it and decided to carry on with pastels.

cI was working from dark to light. I chose chocolate brown to be my darkest colour. I was trying to make different marks for female body(lighter, curvy, smoother) and the male one( harder, angular, 'decisive'). It took a few goes to know what I am after:

(slides below)

This one was my favourite one and I left it at this stage.

I used the rest to layer more colours over them. Once I had all my dark and medium colours roughly applied to the surface, I would take light yellow and and slide it across whole bodies. Yellow would smudge and mix colours underneath, creating more unified feel. When I was sliding yellow over bodies, I was thinking about their curves and shapes, trying to follow them. At the same time I started to wonder how are muscle laid under the skin.

Using this technique I made 6 A2 illuistrations:

In the last one, I started to work in more controlled way, applying pastels to a small surface at a time, using more variables of marks and colours on a part of body. I would like to carry on by referring to actual muscles underneath. I bought a book about anatomy for artist and will apply colours referring to it to get more realistic shapes.

I also tried other colour combinations(below), but wasn't pleased with them. I might play with this image more and see if anything interesting will happen.

with blue background: