The second in my Winter series and I fancied doing a dark Vampire painting.. well why not? I could kind of see it in my mind as to how it should look but it was a question of values. I wanted it dark but not too dark as to the castle just turning into a silhouette although I did want it to loom mysteriously in the background. In the end I went for values grouped around middle to dark and decided on a blue/green - red/orange colour complementary but quite desaturated although I still wanted the whole picture to have a nice general colour to it. Traces of the warm red/brown underpainting show through in the castle and foreground trees to relieve the otherwise monochromatic look it would have had and I decided to have an orange light in one window in the castle as a counterpoint to the rest of the painting in blue/greens. I wanted the Vampire to have a spectral look about him so he is painted as if blending into the frosty air near the ground- he is actually walking across ice but that is difficult to get across.
Gratifyingly a nice lady who has bought a previous Vampire painting off me contacted me before the painting was finished with a view to buying it which makes this the first painting I have sold before it was finished other than private commissions of course.
Oil on fine cotton 16" x 12",
There is a step-by-step progress through this painting in previous posts on this blog.
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