Part Three – Project ‘People in context’ – Exercise – Telling a story

I had some ideas for this exercise but didn’t have any model to help me to carry it out. What I wanted to try and portray was the view of a dart match or dart player in action. I meet some friends most Tuesday evenings for a few games of darts so I had some ideas that I wanted to try. Without having a model to pose for me I turned to google images to try to find what I was looking for. What I found when searching for dart players was a number of the famous players pictures taken from the same angle. There seemed to be little variation in the pose or action shot. There were a few which zoomed in a little on the face which I found slightly more interesting but none that showed the player from behind.

I made some sketches of the familiar poses but none of these was what I wanted.

I noticed that there was a silhouette outline of a generic dart player viewed from the rear which was closer to the composition that I had in mind.

 

I imagined that I could possibly use this pose and build up a scene to portray the composition I wanted. I tried a further two sketches.

 

These both seemed uninspiring and it wasn’t what I was looking for. Yes it did fulfil the brief but I had too much to imagine and felt that I would end up with a poor result.

A further search of Google images revealed the image that I was looking for.

I could take the main elements of this photograph and try to complete a painting in which it would be clear what was happening, the figures whilst being generic would be part of a coherent scene. I set about painting, for once working not setting up a ground and working directly onto paper. I pencilled in the main outlines and shapes and them started painting. I reached a point whereby I considered that painting to be complete and took a photograph of it and then stood back for several minutes to look more closely at what I had produced.

I was happy with the foreground but thought that the background, the dartboard and the surrounding area looked flat as it was devoid of shadows. These I added and again stood back to consider the painting. There were some other possibilities to add further light, say the effects of a spotlight illuminating the wall surrounding the board, but I decided against making any further adjustments. The finished painting is below.

• Part 3 Portrait and Figure