Have you ever been mesmerized by the distortions of shape and colour of a figure swimming underwater? Yes me too. And I’m always in awe of those artists who take up the challenge of recreating those distortions in pastels. This month’s guest blogger takes these recreations seriously. She covers her paper with the minute details of every change she sees. I’m pleased to welcome Michelle Lucking to HowToPastel!

Don’t know Michelle’s work? Here’s a taste!

 

 

Before we start, here’s a wee something about Michelle.

 

Michelle Lucking bio

A self-taught artist, Michelle Lucking has only been painting with pastels for three years. She now works as a full-time professional artist. She has exhibited with the UK Pastel Society at the Mall Gallery London where she won the Annie Longley award in 2017. Her work has been exhibited several times in London and Internationally in Bologna, Italy. She lives by the coast in North Somerset, England.  You can see more of her work and find out more about Michelle Lucking on her website.

 

And here is Michelle Lucking to share her work and process!

 

*****

 

I am so honoured to have been invited by Gail to write about my underwater swimmers in July’s blog! I started painting with pastels three years ago after a hiatus from any type of creativity for 20 years. I started painting seascapes; I was fascinated by the sea. I loved the movement, the moods, and its reflective quality. 

Then the day happened where we bought an underwater camera for a family holiday to take photos of our two girls in the swimming pool, and I was hooked! I fell head over heels in love with the reflective and refracted quality of light you get in a swimming pool. My camera caught reflections from underneath the surface of the water I’d never seen before and the light quality took my breath away! I felt like I’d entered another world and was driven to capture it on paper. 

 

 

I realised that my passion for seascapes was actually a passion for water in all its forms. This led me on a journey to explore the translucency of water and how it interacts with the human body; how the light reflects across the body and more specifically how it refracts and distorts the human form to create fascinating and abstracted shapes of colour.

I paint realism, and I wanted to challenge myself to recreate the complexity of translucent water in a realistic way but with the added dimension of refracted bodies, and rainbow coloured shards of reflected light, all intermixed into an image which actually, when examined close up, looks more abstract than real, until you step back from the image and your eye realises it’s looking at a swimmer submerged in water. I liked the idea of painting this abstract realism. 

 

Reference photos

When painting my swimming pool pieces, a lot of the work is in the preparation. I only use my own reference photos when I paint, and I can spend hours photographing my subject. I used to subject my two girls to endless hours in the pool, photographing them swimming and playing in the water. But in the last year, I have started to do more formally arranged photo shoots where I can spend anywhere between an hour to three hours taking photographs of a model, trying to capture new and unique compositions. 

The underwater photos for me are all about the light and reflections of the swimmer underneath the surface of the water, and trying to capture that sense of otherworldly freedom you experience when you are submerged underwater.

 

 

The photos I take above the water looking down on the swimmer are all about the refractions and physical transformations it creates. In my photo shoots, I like to capture both. 

I use two cameras – One is my GoPro underwater camera which is set to burst mode, so I can take 30 shots over 3 seconds and capture every tiny nuance of light change. I’ve learnt with experience that even the tiniest change in movement creates completely different reflections and refractions and can create a very different composition. The other camera of a DSLR Canon which I use poolside to photograph my swimmer from above the surface of the water. 

It’s not unusual for me to take anywhere between 2000 and 5000 photos during a shoot. The next stage is then sifting through all those photos. It’s a strange mix of being laborious and incredibly exciting. I always find many great photos in the pile, but it’s trying to find the one that grabs my whole attention and stops me in my tracks!

 

Cropping and creating the composition

Once I’ve settled on an image I stare at it for a long while and play around with different crops to create a unique perspective and composition. It’s fun to sometimes create an unexpected crop, especially with the refracted pieces, as it can really lend to the overall feeling of abstract quality of the piece.

For example, Immersed (see the pastel painting at the top of the page) came from a photo where my daughter’s whole body had been captured, lying sideways on. But when I rotated the image, her hair was swept over to the right, partly obscuring her face, and it created a dark and dramatic frame to the image. So I left out most of the original photo, and I cropped her face strongly to the left of the composition in order to create a feeling of sweeping motion of the water with the hair and the bubbles naturally outlining her eye. 

 

 

With Refracted II (see sequence below), I wanted the focus of the painting to be the incredible crazy light patterns across the swimmer’s body which continued into the water around her, the fluid lines contrasting sharply against the spots on her bikini. By taking her face out of the painting I kept it anonymous, so the focus is about the patterns and not the person.

When I painted Into The Blue, I wanted the dominant feature of the painting to be the enormous reflection of my daughter in the water above her head which gradually gets bigger and more distorted as it moves up towards the top of the paper, giving it a sense of depth and perspective and emphasising the illusion that you are under the water with her, and so pulling the viewer into the painting and that underwater world. 

 

 

 

Sometimes the piece evolves and creates its own personality as I paint them – a personality which then dictates the composition. A great example of this is Ophelia. I initially wanted to paint her in a slightly surreal way, and I rotated the image so that she was actually standing upright, even though I photographed her lying on her back. I liked the idea of her appearing to be walking into a mirror – I wanted to paint Alice Through the Looking Glass. However, while I was painting her I became less and less convinced. The painting felt unbalanced.

In the final stages of the piece, I unpinned my painting and rotated it on my studio wall, stepped back, and instantly saw the beautiful Ophelia in her final moments before she drowned, singing serenely.

 

 

 

Pastel, colours, and paper

I favour using Unison Colour soft pastels. They have a buttery soft texture which blends beautifully and the colours are intense and vibrant. I paint on UART 400 grade paper. It’s nice and toothy so it holds several layers of pastel which is perfect for me as I like to layer up several colours. 

For Refracted I, I used the Unison turquoise range, and for Refracted II, I used a lot of Blue Green 1 and 2, and 7, 8 and 9. For Ophelia I wanted a really strikingly bright turquoise, one I couldn’t source anywhere, so I blended Turquoise 3 and 4 with Green 11 (a very vivid lime green). It created such a beautiful hue that I am now working with Unison to create this colour to add to their current range. 

 

Approach

My approach to a painting is to work on it in sections. I tend to paint from the background to the foreground, and where possible, from left to right (I am right-handed and don’t want to smudge the work I’ve created with my hand), and top to bottom, and dark to light. 

I block in large areas of colours and blend with my hand. I then go back and start building up the detail, layer after layer, blending each section with my finger to get a smooth finish. When I get to the final tiny details, I break my pastels using a drawing pin. This creates tiny shards that have sharp edges, just perfect for creating the tiny bubbles and the slivers of sharp light across a swimmer’s body. 

 

 

Blending the pastel with your fingers on a gritted surface like UART400 comes with its own inherent problems. It can, and sometimes does rub your fingers raw. I overcome this by using my whole hand for initial blending where the areas are large and you don’t need to be careful or delicate. But when you’re getting to the smaller areas you do need to refine your approach to a finger.

I use all 4 fingers and continually switch them to spread the impact of the gritted surface. I also ensure there’s a thick initial layer of pastel down before I start blending. The pastel acts as a soft barrier between the paper and my skin. But if a piece requires a lot of blending then I do need to resort to latex gloves to protect my skin.

Possibly one of the most challenging and interesting things to paint is the swimmer. Water does strange things to skin colour, made even more complicated by the light patterns on the skin. Here I find the key thing is to get the base colours right.

 

 

If you look closely at the swimmer in the reference photo, you’ll see that her skin is actually showing some suggestions of reds, purples, and grey blues, as well as some lighter yellows where the light is refracting across her legs. I loosely block these dark colours out – these are my base colours.

 

 

I then start building up layers of light browns – Brown Earth 1 and 31, Grey 27, and Additional 19 and 31 are all excellent colours to create that realistic skin tone for this piece.

 

 

You’ll see from my work in progress photo that the base colours shine through the second layer of skin tones. Then it’s a case of refining and blending until I’ve achieved the desired colour. Once I get to this stage I can use tiny shards of pastel to add the refracted light beams across her skin. 

 

 

 

My underwater paintings are without a doubt taking me on a journey. I’ve explored capturing the joyful play of children underwater. I’ve then taken a slight detour where I wanted a narrative in my underwater women so explored a literary theme in both Undine and Ophelia, both literary characters fatefully connected to water.

More recently I’ve relished examining at great length the abstract realism of refracted light across human anatomy, taking great pleasure in examining the colours and shapes it created.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This summer I’ve stepped it up a little. Over the last month, I’ve organised 5 photo shoots. I’ve not used professional models. Instead, these are people I’ve met with fortuitous luck, which have had a slight ‘meant to be’ feel about them. They’ve all turned out to be fascinating people with their own stories to tell; the ex-synchronised swimmer about to go to London to study to become a professional dancer; the ex-professional windsurfer who was so driven and focussed and made so many sacrifices over years for the love of her sport; a plus-size model, blogger, and advocate of positive body image; a couple deeply in love; and finally the amazing mum and dear friend of mine. 

I’ve spent a lot of time in the water photographing these people and what I’ve realised is that their personalities shone through in each photo I took and I’ve allowed that to influence the composition in the photos I’ve taken. Water has a quality about it that physically and mentally frees people and this is where I’d like to take this journey: exploring that sense of otherworldly light and freedom with all these beautiful people I’ve been lucky enough to photograph.

*****

 

WOW! Amazing how all those areas of colour coalesce into something exquisitely abstract and real at the same time! And I’m in awe of the patience Michelle Lucking has to create this work.

By the way, I wrote about Refracted I in one of my monthly round-ups. You can read what I said here. (Note, it had a different title at that time.)

We would LOVE to hear from you!! Did you learn something new? Have you been inspired to try such intricate work? Do you have questions? Let us know by leaving a comment.

 

Until next time,

~ Gail

 

PS. In case you are interested, here’s a GoPro waterproof camera (up to 33 ft)!