THE PROCESS BEHIND ‘THE INSIDIOUS WHISPER’

Part 3 by David Denton

THE PAINTING PROCESS‘The Insidious Whisper’ was painted using acrylic

paints. I started by blocking in the main areas of the painting and then looked for potential problems.

And I found a huge problem: the way that I had planned to paint the face was too pale and not strong enough. The painting felt

unbalanced.

So I scanned the painting into Photoshop and tried out different things. Also, I looked at my initial lists of words to give me ideas. This mask was better but was lacking something that would lead

the viewer’s eye around the painting.

I liked this idea which featured skyscraper-like

structures, so I worked on a more detailed drawing.

The only problem was that this new head unbalanced the painting in the other direction. So, I removed the wall, extended the painting by 3cm to the right and added in some tentacles to

rectify the problem.

The scariest part of the painting was adding the final layers of fog using thin washes of white paint. I used masking fluid to cover the foreground and then applied a thin wash to the

whole painting.

Masked areas

I repeated this by masking out more of the foreground and applying another very dilute wash.

And so on...

This process had to be done quickly so that the masking fluid didn’t affect the painting underneath.

To watch the painting process in full you can view my time lapse video that also includes a commentary at:

www.daviddentonart.com

https://youtu.be/7ueHxYfsHAo