This is my daughter Sarah at age three. She’s reveling in her makeshift stainless spa
experience known as the “sink bath.”
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Sarah enjoys this, as she can play in the sink for extended periods. The kitchen is a
hub of activity and there’s always someone around to keep an eye out, unlike the
isolated bathtub, where she requires constant supervision at this age. Here, she
can splash and play to her heart’s content.
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I was drawn to this image by Sarah’s expression ... sheer and total delight. Modesty
demanded some creative compositional cropping, so I decided to bend the typical
painting guidelines and intentionally place her left cheek at the edge of the canvas.
This produces an interesting point of tension in the painting. This is balanced by her
posture, as she’s turning back into the scene, which directs the viewer’s eye back
toward the focal point, her right cheek.
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I found the lighting situation interesting, as well. The kitchen had overhead halogen
lights, and the colour temperature of halogen is yellowish orange. The intense
overhead light also generated a strong core of reflected green light from the blue
countertop, into the shadows. The sink was in front of a window, and the colour
temperature of the natural light was bluish from the sunny day outside, so we have
a third light source coming in from the left. That, in turn, generated its own core
reflected light, as well. The result is a rather challenging colour combination to paint,
as pinky-orange skin colour had to meet blue without turning into the usual mud grey
that comes from combining orange and blue, which are complementary (opposite)
colours on the colour wheel.
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Mark Heine