Developing the work

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oooh its so hard to develop.
Its all a bit contrived at the moment but I feel I must push the work along and I have found this a good process in the past. Its all a bit fake and then it gets assimalated and works.
After the drippy painting last week I prepared a couple of large canvases to work on. - One was a plaster base mixed with earth colors and ground up leaves and another was a light mauve layer of expressive paint strokes. ( I see earth as mauve sometimes.)  I decided to work on the plaster one. But I left the drippy paint one for reference.

I worked on the plaster one.. It wasn't working at all, and the truth for me of the body, the strength, the  texture of the skin etc was a bit  lost in the 'earth ' bit. -

 so now its dry I have gessoed over it to creat a smoother surface to work on and using  the drippy one as  a reference I can work on it in the models absence. I still want the earth feel, but more subtle as underlayers I think. anyway we shall see...