Zoe revisited – More masks and backdrawing

For this print I’ve revisited my previous attempt at a backdrawing of Zoe using a photo of her from a few years back.

This time, I decided to add some background colour first.

I painted three areas of colour – pink, brown and blue – onto my glass table, then masked them off to create the shapes – here are the 4 prints I created. I tried to use brush strokes to add some texture, especially to the hair.

With hindsight, I wish I’d gone for much paler colours, because when it came to adding the backdrawing, it was difficult to get the “drawing” colour strong enough to compete with the colours but without being too inky.

You can see what I mean in the prints below – with a couple of these the first pass of the backdrawing was too light – I had to try again with more ink, but then ended up with a bit of a blotchy mess:

This was the best of those 4:

But I thought I’d give it another go, and created another print, this time starting with the backdrawing again, then used tissue paper masks to add a big pink button to the hat, and some light blue to the collar.

Reflections

These didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped really – I wasn’t able to repeat the feel of the earlier backdrawing I’d made here, and I think the big masked colour areas of the first 4 prints were just too strong. But I think the two above are ok  – I quite like the last one with the big red button even though at first I thought that was way too strong too! It’s often the case that I’ll grow to like them more after a while.