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November 16, 2008
Another day of white paint and flour
I use Cryolan Aquacolor for the body paint, lovely stuff, but it’s difficult.
As painters found for four hundred years, until Ingres came along, it’s difficult to lose the brush strokes. So we, unlike Ingres, who used skill and a 400 year learnt technique, use flour, plain white flour.
This serves two purposes – it acts as a mild abrasive, smoothing the white body paint and affectively removing most of the brush stokes, it also creates a wonderful soft dusty texture to the skin.
On the down side the fine flour plays hell with the camera so I’ve got to be careful to keep the airborne flour in another part of the studio.
The result is the smooth white flesh tones I have in many of my photographs and more recently in my films.
I’ve written before about why I paint the figure white, and not come to any conclusions. Suffice it to say I just love the look, it’s graceful and timeless and is a good staring point to begin to look at the power complexity of the human form.
Posted by john at November 16, 2008 09:28 PM