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Ah, welcome to the wonderful world of pointilism. For those of you who don't know, pointilism is (as the name would suggest) a technique in painting where mixing your colours is eschewed in favour of building up layers of colour using thousands and thousands of little dots. Arguably the most famour purveyer of the pointilist technique (and my personal favourite, at the very least) was Georges-Pierre Seurat. Check out his work; it's jaw-droppingly good.

I've chosen to utilize a pointilist technique for the background of the 'girl with teddy' painting due to the fact that in one of the reference photographs, the little girl in question is standing on a stony surface of some description, which appears to be made up of lots and lots of small grey pebbles. I was probably attracted to trying to recreate this background because grey is my favourite colour (obligatory geeky Counting Crows reference: I felt so symbolic yesterday/If I knew Picasso/I'd buy myself a grey guitar and play...) and I thought this background would look rather smashing as a pointilist field.

You can see the next two layers of dots in the images below. As you can tell, it's a painstaking method of painting and it is extremely time consuming; I've spent most of today painting small grey dots and now I can see them in front of my eyes even though I'm no longer painting (my good eye, anyway). You can't really tell due to the limitations of the technology here, but this isn't just a case of mixing up one colour and just dotting away like a crazed... dot-painting-type-person (must put more thought into coming up with a decent simile next time). Each dot, particularly on the second of these two photographs, is a subtly different shade, each shade being mixed individually, and each dot is shaped and sized differently too.

Harking back to my last post about this painting, I hope you can begin to see why I put in those red and blue layers with the scrubbing brush before I went all pointilist over the top with a small paintbrush. You can't see much of the red and blue (and you'll be able to see even less of it once I've finished going all dotty) but it's just visible enough to bring the greys to life.

Oh, the second picture isn't a finished version of the background, by the way; I had to stop and take the photograph at that stage because I ran out of white paint. I could have sworn I had another tube of it but I've hunted high and low and I can't find one anywhere. Looks like I'll be making a trip to the art supplies shop in the morning...
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