Funny thing happened to me though when I weened myself off chemically laden scents and household products, the smell of perfumes such as this one smelt unpleasant to me. You can liken it to the instance when denying yourself sugar in coffee for some time you eventually start to dislike the taste of sugar in the caffeine injected beverage, gek, too sweet!
As the name subtly suggests, the scent is addictive and engages those ‘give me more’ firings in the complex pathways of our brain maps. You may be asking why I painted this, because it sounds like my bias sways away from what this product represents, I’ll explain. I saw potential to replicate and practice something I haven’t done before with watercolours; black and white high contrast. Usually with watercolour you get an unpredictable array of colour bleeds and transforming subtleties but when using just black, well technically I used Payne’s Grey, you need to aim for high shine and areas of shadow and reflection. A black and white tonal piece can be just as striking as a highly saturated piece, and here I could really focus on the values. Also, after I painted Coco Chanel as a commission I found applying looseness to something structured was fun to experiment with and made the subject matter more humane.
You’ll see half way through I also did the stiff brush spatter thing that people use to paint a starry sky or a deep space nebula backdrop. A couple of more than anxious splodges made their way on to the paper initially by no way of fault of the operator ;) I wiped those off and blended them back in, these things happen! You will see that my circle is not perfectly perfect at the bottom but that’s OK as it can be corrected when applying the highlights and reflections with white gouache. Gouache is an opaque version of watercolour, magical stuff but I know I can’t rely on it and need to plan white space ahead of time. Other than the writing also being off centre and my head in the way sometimes, I think this one came out nice; an average evaluation for an average subject.
** Stuff’s just black and white sometimes
Music: https://www.bensound.com
