Hi Guys

Happy New Year to you all, hope everyone is doing great.
My first post for the year is a painting I made late last year titled “TIMELESS ELEGANCE”. In pursuit of engaging in something different other than my usual technique of creation. I decided to delve a bit into the realm of impasto painting using a monochromatic colour scheme of blue and it’s complementary color as an accent colour to help further push the ambience of the piece.
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"Timeless Elegance" in African beautification tradition refers to the continent's ancient and enduring practices of adornment, grooming, and self-expression. From intricate hairstyles and body markings to ornate jewelry and textiles, African beautification traditions exude a classic, sophisticated charm that transcends time and trends. These timeless practices not only enhance physical beauty but also convey cultural identity, spirituality, and community values.

On this stage, I created a light wash of acrylic paint on the already sketched figure on the canvas. This serves as cover up for any area that might be left out uncovw in the process of painting in other for the bare canvas not to show and create a kind of disturbance to the eyes. This process helps unite the painting together in the case of blank areas by using similar colour to the main colour scheme.

Here I begin to go in by blocking off the areas I know my base color will be evidently showing on which I’ll be building my light tones on and mid dark tones

At this point I began to have a clearer view of how I want the end work to look like by adding in my darkest dark. Of which I still had some slight little dark tones in to create what we call reflective light. This helps bring out some forms on the face that might be lost in the dark tones in other to give the overall look of the facial form a better rendition

After a long contemplation, I decide to make the background abstracted using the accent colours. Deciding on what to do with the background of my works have always been a challenge for me and it’s one of the things I need to work on this year as regarding my art. Background is one of the important aspects of creating an artwork cause it has the final power to decide what the mood of the painting will be and if care is not taken, one might end up passing the wrong information with his/her choice of background

Finally, I added the finishing touches to the work by adding my lighter areas and highlights, and also some areas that need to be a bit more dark in other to create a good contrast and draw the viewers attention to my focal point.

Cc. @stef1 @joslud @wakeupkitty