First cast painting, the ear.
Started with the transfer drawing(left), took me a whole week and still didn't get it quite right, the ear confuses my eyes. Forgot to take a picture of it, will just add that in the last post of this trimester later. The actual cast(middle), and some value studies(right), trying to see what's best to show the over casting shadow better.
I have been finding a way to avoid the use of solvents, meaning I have to find a way to tone my canvas without it. I simply don't want to become reliant on toxic materials in my daily activities. So I have a watercolor smeared canvas(raw umber and ivory black) and 2 egg glair toned canvases (no time to make one with tempera yet), one in raw umber, one in grey. I ended up using the watercolor toned one first, since the glossy surface of glair didn't take charcoal well. I will have to try transfer with water color or oils when I find the time to do it. Recently came across Bryan Larsen from listening to Danny Grant's podcast. On Larsen's website he shares his process, and I was happy to see that he shares his way of transferring with oil colors, this helped me with my doubts with watercolor transfer.
*under painting in raw umber and mars black(ear in the middle of the picture below).
Value study (below, left), under painting added titanium white(below, right)
Establish the values. I started out with 8 values(image above right), but later decided it was too complicated to start out with 8. Scraped the paint layer off a little and repainted with 5 values the next few days(image below). painted over the background with more black and white mixture for the visual impression. Now they need to go darker again, as I have been working on the light areas of the cast for 2 days.
