Progress

I made some good progress on the two skull paintings this weekend. Yesterday, I got the lizard skull transferred to panel and added the acrylic underpainting. Today, I put in the dark prussian blue background. It has a subtle value transition and gets lighter moving towards the top.

I also put down the first layer of reds on the chimps and began establishing their form and major shadows. Any flaws of the original sketch start to become evident during this stage. So I made some adjustments to the chimp on the right, making his left leg more to the side instead of face on to the viewer. I also moved the leg up on the chimp to the left. When I painted it in, the trunk looked too long. I think some of this distortion occurs when the tracing paper stretches when I'm transferring the drawing to panel. The original sketch did not have this distortion.

The next stage for the chimp painting will be very time consuming, as the next layer will add the details of the anatomy for both skull and chimps.