Woman in a Red Kimono – 10-11-22

Prankster

This colored pencil drawing ‘Woman in a Red Kimono – 10-11-22’ answers the most frequently asked question of late. I thought this prank of the red kimono title given to monochrome drawings would be appreciated. However, there were many that took the bait and mailed me with regard to the total absence of red. To satisfy their whim down I finally made this drawing. Hmm, of course satisfying my own inner urge to return to colored pencils may be the cause as well. I always wanted to make something similar to a previous drawing, called ‘Julia – 11-09-18’. That one exceeded my expectations and the divisionalist result I found very exciting. In this one I skipped the cubist styling though.

Hatching up

As you can see the drawing was done in hatched strokes,deviating from the execution of the Louise Brooks drawing. Before 2015 I exclusively worked with hatching until I discovered Bristol paper allowing me to study smooth gradients. There was this one thing on my wish list though. That was hatching on Ingres paper and I didn’t do that yet. It gave me the most wonderful broken linear structures with the white of the paper shimmering through. Because of that the depiction almost becomes impressionistic by nature. Added broken contour delineations this was the appearance I was looking for at this moment.

One in Another

A year ago I had my regular model pose in a group session in the Binckhorst quarter. The hostess of this session happened to own this wonderful purple couch. It was as if it was destined to be seated by her. Because of her indian descendance her skin hues are mainly yellowish, complementing the couch wonderfully. We were in a deserted office building with no particular striking walls. I decided to counterbalance the red kimono with greens in the background. Otherwise the purple, red and yellow would warm up the beholder’s eyes too much. In esssence there are four main parts: kimono, woman, couch and background, each of them showing a striking color. Therefor I repeated all four colors in each and every part in order to create harmony in contrasts. One in another; variation in repetition and repetition in variation.

Colored pencil (Faber-Castell, Caran d’Ache, Prismacolor) drawing on Fabriano Ingres paper (28.2 x 21 x 0.1 cm)

Artist: Corné Akkers