Killer on the Road: Part Four

We're now starting to see an almost completed painting. You can see that I've fleshed out the furrows by blending black into red until it looks like it is supposed to. What you may not notice is that the lines of the furrows on the right side of the road have been changed in direction.

This is the problem that I was talking about at the end of part three. In the sketch, the shape of the enclosing rectangle is slightly taller which gave enough room for the furrows to flow off the right, but with the narrower shape of the MDF I had to repaint the furrows to go off over the hill and into our imaginations.

After this was resolved, I had to blend in the gray. First I had to cover the ends of the rows with white to provide some sort of barrier between the gray and the red. Then I had to add the gray, being careful to not pick up too much black. But everything kept mixing together anyway, making a muddy mess. I needed a solution and I ended up diving right in and pushing lots of paint around, smearing the gray over the red and the red over the gray until it looked right. Sometimes you have to bold while painting and take risks. Luckily this time it worked out. (Sometimes you end up scraping it off with the knife and starting over.)

So after the fields were done, I had this bright white road down the middle and thought it needed some dirtying up. I used a brush with some dark grey and black on it and scumbled it around a bit in the white. This seemed to work but it was a little too dirty. I went over it again with white, which brightened it up, but still let some of the darker color show, adding some texture to the blank road.

In the second photo you can see the only thing I added was the fence. This called for a thin brush that could carry a lot of paint. There's only one brush for the job and that's the liner brush.

The liner can be tricky since it has a tendency to go out of control and will loose paint at the tip first which means you have to press harder bringing side of the bristles down to finish the stroke, but this also means that you usually end up with a thicker line since the hairs of the brush start to fan out. Once this happens you need to reload the brush with paint which means twirling it through a big gob of thinned paint until all the bristles line up and it is back to its original shape.

Once you get the hang of it, it's not that bad, you just have to watch what you are doing and know when it's time to reload. So after I slapped in the fence it was time to let it dry for the final stage.

I still need to paint the figure on the road and put in my signature finishing touches. This will be much easier to do when it is dry. So for now, part five is going to have to wait as we watch the paint dry.

(To be continued.)