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Stanka, thank-you so much for your generous comments and well-wishes! And thank-you for taking the time to post your comments. They mean a great deal.
When I painted that painting (about 5 or 6 years ago) I was using a lot of earthy colours such as yellow ochre, burnt sienna, raw umber, burnt umber and also basic reds such as cadmium and alizarin crimson. It was the palette introduced at University by our lecturers. They were mostly landscape artists and transfered their landscape palette to the figure. But it worked very well. Nowadays I am using a lot of lemon yellow, terra verte, and cadmium orange, ultramarine blue, and phthalo blue. I am also using some mars yellow and naples yellow to keep the background figures and receding parts of the forefigure warm but not too prominent. I find that a good thick titanium white, such as winsor and newton's one, is great for achieving the substance of flesh
I don't use any medium, just oil paint, although sometimes I do use liquin as a sort of varnish to bring out the transparency and saturation of the paint once it has dried.
I just work the paint, the drawing, and the tonal relationships together, and shifting and reshifting everything around (if I have the guts as it gets harder to be brave the closer the painting is to working) until it looks like a figure in space. At the moment I am working the blues and greens in the light with the yellow whites to create a sense of form. I am also beginning to really see the relationship of the background with the figure - rather than just putting the background in, I am really working the tones, lightnesses and complementariness of colours with the figure to make the figure pop out in a very tactile way.
I am looking a lot at Lucien Freud - very intelligent painter.
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