When I was a young girl I went to ballet lessons. I loved them and tried my best, but my ballet teacher would always say: “Point your toes, Louise!” I would say: “But I AM pointing them!” in return. I could never seem to point them enough for her liking and unfortunately never progressed to points. I guess I just wasn’t putting in enough effort to achieve the desired results, even though I thought I was.
There is such physical exertion and effort behind every ballerina’s seemingly effortless and weightless performance. I admire them greatly. I also recently discovered that they’re a lovely subject matter for watercolour painting. The transparency and luminescence of watercolour paints suits them admirably.
Blue Ballerina is my first effort at painting these graceful dancers. Below you can see the first three stages in my process. First, I did a pencil sketch of the dancer. I must confess that I rather struggled with her left hand (the hand facing the viewer on the right). This was mainly in shadow on the original photograph, so I was hoping to rectify any errors as I applied paint.
Wet-in-Wet Technique
As the ballerina’s legs show through her net skirt, I knew I would have to paint them first and add the skirt later. Once the legs were dry, I applied water to the skirt area and then added a wet-in-wet wash to indicate the lightness and transparency of the dress material. This was the only area where I used the wet-in-wet technique.
Filling in the details
Once the skirt was dry I started working on the top half of the painting. As I thought they would be, the hands were a challenge. It took quite a few layers of paint and darkening of shadows to get her left hand to a point where I was happy enough with the result.
After I had finished with the arms and hands, I moved on to her face and hair. As this was very delicate work, I used a size 000 brush for her eyes, nose and mouth detail.
The final details and shadows were then added to finish off the painting.
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