Good morning! My name is Daniel Maidman, and I'm a figurative painter working in Brooklyn. After much hesitation, I'm finally getting around to starting a blog, pretty much about painting. So why don't I jump right in? I'm working on a painting of Alley, a delightful model well known to artists at Spring Street Studios.
In the painting, she is holding her left arm behind her back with her right hand. So both arms are behind her back. This stretches the skin over the bones of her shoulders, and produces a particular kind of hard highlight which I love to paint. The painting overall is lit with a kind of specular overhead light, so there are highlights on all her sharpest planes, where the bone is closest to the skin. Perhaps this is that "bony light" in which Pleasant Riderhood does not wish to regard herself in Our Mutual Friend. For my part, I find it very delightful, and Alley is good enough to hold her arms in a twisted-up way to produce the highlight.
Because the light source itself is cold (colder in the painting than in real life, where it is probably only about 4000K), I am deploying yet another trick I learned from Adam Miller - mixing a little bit of blue into the white I'm using in the highlight. In this case, Mussini's King's Blue Light. I think. I'm not in my studio right now - how am I supposed to remember? I've learned a lot of excellent things from Adam though.
Anyhow, I'll post a picture of the Alley painting soon.
Enough for today. More later.