The Walls of Unsaid

Making of

Painting the Walls of Unsaid has been a very tedious work. Firstly, architecture requires a high precision in perspective lines else the viewer won't believe in the third dimension. Secondly, I have been painting this canvas at a period of my life during which I was spending more than 11 hours at work, daily.
The sad, yet inspiring feeling of a love story unavoidably going to an end has accompanied me all along those lonely nights painting, and I must admit, has been a very powerful source for...trueness.

At first the idea was totally different. This study mixes up pencil sketch, photoshop coloring and Poser character rendering. I had worked a lot on this character pose, which I still like a lot and will probably reuse somewhere, but later my main idea took a u-turn. I had to leave this character study aside. It's the only time I have ever used Poser for a pose study.	After the multiple paper sketches, I started drawing the whole scene on the canvas. It's mostly made of buildings (straight lines), and has a strong perspective effect. I couldn't just go on with oil paint without trustable basis underneath... so I patiently drew the scene, measuring, computing dimensions, drawing perspective-correct ellipses... it took me a lifetime.
This is a new character study with Poser. I was not satisfied with that one (too rigid and simplistic...) and my paper sketches did not fit either... later I decided to use real models and photograpy to help me pass through this headache crisis.	March 2003, the painting is going on. I paint almost every evening of the week, often exhausted after my working day on computers, and sometimes have to force myself hard to have this stuff progress.
The day I discovered Geoffrey O'Donnell, an excellent fine art nude photographer located in Australia, I asked him if he could be of any help for my character pose. He kindly accepted to help! These were the shots he sent me... unfortunately a bit late, I had already done my own photo session, thanks to his incredibly helpful directions.	A photo session with Virginie (herself...) that finally gave me the solution to my character pose problem. It helped me to find the pose, but not to paint it. The task was even harder due to the fact that I wanted her face to be alike on the canvas. This is the trickiest thing I've ever tried to do!
February 2004... i'm finally done! :)