Sunday, June 13, 2010

Tutankhamon's body - line drawing ready

Took me three hours to transfer the drawing of Tutankhamon to the board, but now he is done. I tried to make the beads approximately right, but obviously I did not put all the details in place. My reference photo wasn't quite good enough for that. I squinted with my magnifying glass, tried printing details of the photo, but still it was blurry.

But thank goodness I found help. The Werner Forman Archive was more than kind and gave me permission to use their photo as a reference to this painting. Please check their wonderful resource of photos for anyone working in the field of history - be it studying of publishing. You will find their link on the link list.

4 comments:

  1. very nice, :) i always wondered with artist and their work, what do you do if you half way through made a mistake?

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  2. That's pretty easy with oil paints: you just paint over LOL :D But of course with an image of such detail as Tut's throne the underdrawing needs to be just about correct first. But even here I have not drawn every single bead etc - I'll just paint them in when the time comes.

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  3. Hello Leena, great to discover your blog. Some of my paintings are inspired by ancient Egyptian art too, though I concentrate on the depictions of wildlife. You're right about being able to paint over mistakes in oils, but you can make corrections in watercolour too. Best not to make the mistakes in the first place though!!!!

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  4. Hi, Jackie :)

    I quite agree - that is why try to do meticulous work right from the start. Not so much to fix later.

    Just you guess what it was like to do the Cleopatra & Caesarion painting with all those hieroglyphs... So easy to make mistakes there (I only start to study hieroglyphs next year at the Manchester University so it is pretty easy to misspell without knowing it).

    Leena :)

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