Where I first saw this image I don’t recall, but it stuck with me and I later came upon it again by accident and saved it. The undulating line of the dancers’ arms, the peaks and falls of their feet, what a terrific combination. I sketched it in acrylic in black and white and then tracked down the story via image search. The First Negro Classic Ballet Company leaps on Laguna Beach in 1947. The exuberance and soaring freedom seemed so perfect an antidote to COVID cabin fever. I got to work as a housewarming gift for a valued co-worker.
After doing the sketch I enlarged the image just focusing on the outline of the figures to get the basic silhouette down right.
I worked up the image with light tone choices. The main lesson I learned here was to - go way lighter in the sky. I originally had what looked like a photo negative. After I had corrected the sky tone, I had this right balance and could get some headway on the anatomy and modeling.
Next I went back with darker tones on the figures and the background. This was really useful to me, a lesson in developing a painting that I had not learned before. I toyed with the idea of finishing the whole thing in black and white and then just adding a handful of color accents but this seemed gimmicky.
Moving into color choices I was operating on my own imagination since the original image was black and white. I used thalo blue in the sky, the water, the hills, and the dark clothing elements. I used orange, black, and zinc white adding some thalo blue in the darkest points for the bodies of the dancers. Later I added some quinacridone red to the blouses of the dancers at each end and the passerby. I used some cadmium and lemon yellow for the stripes.
Getting to this point was about a 6-8 hour operation and then adding the blue sky took hours more. Even then it looked colored in with a crayon so I had to go back with a second coat.
Over the next several days, usually early mornings, I fixed anatomic problems, tightened up the borders between coats- eliminating the “lacuna” was the job. Fancy word to say I took out the stray spots or stripes of unpainted canvas. I got it to a near final point with one more pass. Toward the end, I focused on the hills and the distant buildings, reducing the number and shape of them and bringing in some greenery around them. I also improved the hand gestures of the dancers on the ends. Here is just about where it ended up.
Click below to scroll through enlargements of the dancers.
