More grandchildren of Finwe

[bunn]

Maedhros, Fingon and Celegorm were going hunting with Huan, until little Curufin demanded one more ride on the giant doggy.  Curufin might be regretting it, now that Huan has licked him so enthusiastically! In the background, Finrod, Turgon and Maglor are looking at a mandolin, and Caranthir is reading a book. A3 painting in acrylic.

I'm a bit annoyed with myself about this one, because I tried painting it before on a big A1 acrylic paper sheet, got bogged down, gave up, came back to it to try to paint it on an A3 card instead, and then instead of drafting out the main image on a separate sheet, I did the whole thing in pencil on the actual card.  It looked good in pencil, but the faces fell apart when I applied paint, and of course, since I'd applied paint, I no longer had the pencil to refer to.

By now I should know to do a draft sketch on a separate piece of paper, that always goes better than painting over the pencil, even if I take a photo of it.  Messing about doing more and more overpainting is much more frustrating than another draft.

I think I've also worked out one reason why photographing paintings is often so frustrating : the painting is composed of layers of paint with variable transparency, and the camera picks up slightly different transparency from the layers to the eye.  So a layer that looks smooth to the eye can look more blotchy or contrasty... I don't know what the best approach is to that, but I think probably as usual 'paint thicker' may help.