This picture was the reason I made a tumblr because I someone posted it on Facebook and they said they found it on tumblr so bless this picture
The Crimson Thumbnail
I created the original version of this piece roughly twenty years ago. It was drawn (in about twenty minutes) from a live model in an artist’s workshop. My medium, as usual, was the same medium in which your child specializes: crayon.
When I rebuilt the sketch digitally, I applied techniques that gave it the look of an oil painting. I was especially pleased with the way the “oil” sculpted the soft, beautiful forms of the model’s thighs and (dramatically untanned) posterior.
Lovely as it is, I never intended that feature to dominate the whole picture; so I took the simple step of adding a dot of bright crimson to the thumbnail just above. Viewed at actual size, this simple touch of crimson pulls the eye toward it, away from the Coppertone ad and (I hope) up the arm and down again via that mass of dark hair, toward the soft modeling of the flesh behind the knees.
That is a lot of traveling, but the route is quite scenic.
