How I painted a 1920's Beach Beauty ⛱

Beach Beauty

I always tape my flat canvas panels to a piece of larger board.  I find it easier to work without an easel but I have a desktop sized one for when it is needed.  Taping the panel to a board gives you handling room.  As I don't use the easel I hold my canvas all the time so having it mounted onto a larger board keeps finger marks from your finished piece. To Mount it I put Masking Tape around the edges of my canvas panel, at a width of about 5mm and pressed it down firmly to give a nice crisp and clean frame.

This pic shows the template cut out ready to draw around

So as you can see I have mounted the Canvas Panel onto my larger Board with Masking Tape and I am ready to go.  In this instance, I am going to paint a background before drawing around my cutout template.

 

Daler Rowney Graduate Acrylic Coeruleum Blue Hue mixed with Pebeo Studio Acrylics Titanium White gave the main light blue Summer Sky.  I then added a few Titanium White wisps in (not too much) just for some wispy high cloud. 

Once it was dry I decided whereabouts the horizon would be and drew around my template (below).   I had small pieces of Masking Tape to hold it in place while I carefully drew around it.  Put them in easy places where you can fill in the detail easily after removing the template.

This pic shows the positioning of temporary tape to
hold template in place

Keep your template handy, don't throw it away as you will need it to refer to.

Rosa fills in the gaps of the template

Drawing in the rest of the details can be tricky so take your time.  Have an eraser handy, you are going to need it.

Basic outlines are drawn

I hope you can see the pencil lines in the above photo.  You just need basic outlines, I always think of it like I am creating an image in a colouring book.  You don't need to worry about the finer details at this point.  Here is a zoomed in Image.

The basic image is now transferred to the canvas panel

As I found this original image online, of course it doesn't belong to me.  I don't want my version to be a complete carbon copy of the original one so I will give the lady a different bathing suit and hat so that it has my own personal touch to it.

These photos show how I built up the skin colour using five different colours.  I especially like her upper right arm, it looks slightly sunburnt but it is actually in the shade.  But I manged to blend the colours quite well here.  

I just carried on from here.  The next areas I worked on were face and hair.  I used Mars Black and a very fine brush to get the eye just right.  With one tiny Titanium White dot in the centre.  I gave her jet black hair too.  I tried to give her hair a bit of a wavy style, typical of the art deco era.

After completing hair and face I worked on her Swimsuit and Hat.  I could not decide what colour to go for and I decided on Cream which I think was a good choice.

You can see it all coming together now.  At this point I still hadn't decided what colour the towel would be.  I felt it needed to be something different from the Cream of her suit and the blue of the sky.  I nearly went with Navy but settled on Burgundy in the end.