Here is a glimpse of the painting entitled "No Doll" that I've started this year on January 1st. It's an interior scene with a character, no green palette this time, it is warm and feminine.
It began really fast, I made the underpaint in a matter or 4 or 5 painting sessions, but now it's getting a bit slow with the fat paint layers, all the detailing and those sparse schedules. Sigh... But it's looking good still. I hope to finish it soon !

J'avance dans la haute pièce, je ne fais que passer, il fait nuit mais sans voir je le sais: là sur ma droite, se dresse fier et droit, le chevalet de bois_ portant ma joie, puisant ma peine. La masse peinte, modelée de sombre, me captive, m'appelle. Les pinceaux absents de mes paumes, de déception grimacent, en coeur s'éplorent: qu'on me retienne! Quelques jours, cinq au plus, quelques jours loin de vous. Je vous blesse, aussi vous aime.

_je n'ai de compagnie plus chère que celle que je délaisse.

Titre inspiré de Catchers Song for Autumn


Le tableau avance doucement. Ce weekend j'ai travaillé sur les cheveux de Camille; je n'ai pas beaucoup l'habitude de ces tons, du rouge en général, mais me laisse séduire par les couleurs feu et le soyeux des flous. Je pose des gestes attentifs, faisant mille manières, pratiquement à l'écoute du bruissement du pinceau pour ne jamais risquer de troubler cette intimité autre. Je dois absolument céder la place du maître: c'est la vie dans ces veines, la soie de ce cou qui décident du geste.

Yes, it seemed I was back to painting churches. I didn't know why and didn't ask for clues. Answers came anyway; and I didn't expect this much.
And now. where are we?

It's a sketch for a painting I've been thinking of for some time. She's a doll, more like a puppet in fact, whose strings have been cut, and now she's walking into her freedom with her fragility and her loneliness, but with the will to find herself and make up for her own identity.
She has this victorian feel, with some melancholy in her eyes, giving the impression that she's from another century and has been kept hidden for a long time until she arrives in our days.

It is intended to be painted on a canvas that is 175cm in height and 80 in width, with a real life inspiration for the character; someone tiny enough to fit in at 1:1 scale.

What a life. Torn off, excessive, chaotic, unstable, and useless in many ways. Stuck within that mess of a brain I found it nearly impossible to start up a new painting.
Finally I saved a few hours of my saturday afternoon to sit down and doodle the layout for a painting to come. The subject matter is quite sarcastic towards myself, even though I don't want it to depict an introspective situation. I've been turning that in my head for a long time, with that fear of sounding misplaced, but gave up on auto-censoring. The fact is I am in an urgent need to paint, for mental sanity's sake.
Maybe I have some urgent concerns to expell.

The last summer has been really harsh to me. Instead of vacations I've been trapped in intensive work and constant hassle, leaving so little place for artistic matters. A too long period without touching a brush make me unavoidably drift towards a sort of depressive mood, and this is not good.
Going back to painting was hard at first, but at very first only. The pleasure to melt fresh colors, the smell of paint, the soft movement of my wrist caressing the canvas, all those sensations where recalled like a deep breath of vivid air.

Tears of Joy in the Garden of Giants, oil paint version, had been standing there in my room for a long time. Since I made another painting in between, I guess I hadn't touched it up for 6 months. Actually it was entirely covered, but in most places it was still the dry layer, rough and tern. There is still a lot to do with this wide painting, and I'm not in a hurry.
I've almost repainted the whole glass dome, trying to fix some architectural distortions here and then. Although it was really easy digitally, the glow effect on the dome is really hard to achieve with oil paint, and even though it looks great now I'm not fully satisfied.
Then I switched to the first character's features. Here face has been reworked, mostly a second (or third) paint layer, then a lot of detailing. I added grain texture, cracks and artifacts on her skin that is supposed to be something between plant bark and soft female skin.
I also started to paint the tears, shining in the bright light.

The plant's shoulder, here back, some plants where detailed here and then.

I feel like a 3D renderer

While I paint I keep thinking about the light rules all the time.
The light in this painting comes from upper left, rear to front. Colors in the light have brighter, warmer tones, while in the shadow they are colder (grey, blue tones). I think it has something to do with diffraction, but I'm not sure why the transition between a lit surface and a cast shadow gets tinted with a more saturated tone.
A surface that is lit from behind in such way that the light shines through will have a very saturated tint. To obtain this tint it's necessary to clean up your brushes properly, then to tame primary colors only, with a fair amount of yellow in it to get some warmth.
In comparison, surfaces on which light falls directly before bouncing toward our eye, are much less saturated ( see the branch on the shoulder compared to the translucent leaves?)
Also, to achieve glossiness with paint, a surface must always leave a gap for a brighter color ( that means: never paint a surface with pure white ). The white spot is called specular spot; it is the result of the light source itself reflecting on a highly glossy surface.
By looking at how light reacts on casual objects you get to observe such a variety of effects. Sometimes, facing a unpredictable result, you have to search for physical reasons. There always physical reasons for everything.
However, what's great with painting as opposed to photographing for instance, is that you have a the freedom to cheat, by exaggerating an effect to emphasize another for instance.
Anyway, I could go on and on, but I consider that before I can teach anything, I still have so much to learn...