Painting process

After a fourth coat of spray paint

This was probably my least favourite stage of the process. By this point, I felt mentally and physically drained, and I found myself procrastinating a little. I think this was because I knew I had to cover such a large surface area in white paint, and the process felt quite repetitive.

Thankfully, one of my peers, Ollie, helped me with some of the painting. I was incredibly grateful for the extra pair of hands, and it definitely made the task feel more manageable. Once the edges were painted, it was time to focus on the main figures.

I quickly realised that the painting process was very different from my second face-to-face piece. Because this work contained up to four layers of clothing in some areas, it was much harder to reach all of the surfaces with a brush; also, the clothes have more flexibility to them than the other previous pieces. I tried standing the board upright to make the process easier, but it still proved difficult. As a result, I decided to switch to spray paint.

I had experimented with spray paint on the face-to-face piece but preferred the finish achieved with acrylic paint. However, given the scale of this work and the limited time available, spray paint felt like the most practical solution. After four coats, I could already see that several more would be needed, making it quite an expensive process. Despite this, I was pleased with how the spray paint performed on the harder objects such as the bottles, dummies and shoes. The paint highlighted all of their details and textures, creating a much cleaner finish than I had expected.

My next step is to continue building up the layers of spray paint until I am happy with the coverage. Once complete, I plan to paint the background an off-white colour to help the figures stand out more clearly, similar to the approach I used in the face-to-face piece.