Dinner for Two: stage-by-stage photos.
Scroll down to see the full sequence.
This painting can be seen larger in the gallery. It's a fairly old painting and I've refined this way of working quite a lot, but what I do is still largely the same. The Tattooed Fairy sequence is more typical of my smaller, very detailed paintings.
![eleven](images/step_df2_11.jpg)
![one](images/step_df2_01.jpg)
Original drawing. A lot of the additional figures are on tracing paper - this way I can sketch them in approximately the right place and adjust everything later.
![two](images/step_df2_02.jpg)
Drawing transferred to stretched watercolour paper (‘hot-pressed’ paper 140 lb weight). And the first few areas painted. The paint is 'gouache' - similar to watercolour paint, but more opaque.
![three](images/step_df2_03.jpg)
More painting. At this stage this is really a process of ‘colouring-in’ with an appropriate colour.
![four](images/step_df2_04.jpg)
Finished ‘colouring-in’, the last section of wall will be the same as the background colour.
![five](images/step_df2_05.jpg)
This is the scary bit.
![six](images/step_df2_06.jpg)
A series of layers of paint cover the original painting. Usually I wet the whole surface first, add a layer of paint, dry the whole thing with a couple of hairdryers and repeat the process until I get what I want. It’s also possible to paint over the dry painting, but wetting the surface allows me to achieve a fairly even graduation of colour.
![seven](images/step_df2_07.jpg)
This is about right. In this case there will not be much of this top paint layer left by the end - otherwise I would have worked a bit more to get it less streaky.
![eight](images/step_df2_08.jpg)
This is the fun bit. By a process of wetting and blotting the paint using progressively harder textured brushes the paint can be lifted to reveal the colour beneath.
![nine](images/step_df2_09.jpg)
The paper is stained by the first colour that is put on it - so to a large extent the original paint layer remains, although some colours stain far more than others.
![ten](images/step_df2_10.jpg)
Most of the ‘unpainting’ is finished here, especially on the left hand side.
![eleven](images/step_df2_11.jpg)
Some final shading, details of faces etc., painted last of all. The colours are a little different here compared to the completely finished image in the gallery - this is because this series was taken using flash photography instead of scanning the image like I usually do.