This painting is now close to completion. The guy on the right took most of the afternoon and evening. Painting with watercolour is nerve-wracking. Much easier if it was acrylic or oils – one could just wipe off any changes. This is not possible with watercolor.
You can lift watercolour paint from the paper by wetting and blotting it - not fully, but usually enough. But when you add wet paint on top of dried watercolour all the colours re-activate. I'm using a nearly drybrush technique with the whitener - and hoping to keep the colour underneath. Any mistakes and I have to wet and blot and it goes through all the layers and I get a 'hole' that is very hard to fill to look like the original layers again.
Anyway, that said, the guy on the right is currently dominating the painting. I need to do the shadows on his face and hair, and the highlights, and then see. The guy on the left has trousers on, and his hips are in deep shadow. But if I do that, all of the figures will lift off the background and not be integrated into the swirl of blue.
My daughter, who's only seen the image here, thinks maybe to leave the guy on the right 'faceless' and so I am considering that too. Then the painting is about the central figure, and the other two are half-formed, sinking into a background that they are emerging from.
(iPhone 6s+ photo late at night, colour corrected for the exposure and the blues but the oranges became muted)
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