Eggs in the Pool

A bit of a different blip today. I went to the first session of the second term of the weekly figure and portrait painting classes I attend.

We were introduced to egg tempera painting this time, preparing a pool-side scene. We were working from life models, but with the intention of placing them in a different environment in our paintings.

This is not something I've done before! Part of it involves familiarity with perspective. If you want to put figures in a scene you need a way of scaling them depending on how far they are from you. Unless you're going for a Bayeux tapestry look of course, in which case no need to bother!

And where do you draw the horizon?! Not above someone's head, unless you're looking down on them... or if they're standing in a crater.

Egg tempera dries very quickly, so using it is more like using felt tip pens than oil or acrylic paint. This means you can build it up on many layers of varying levels of transparency.

At the moment this pool scene looks like one of the UK's beloved water companies was involved.