Dancer Series Silk Paintings: Burlesque

fans still drying

After deciding to work on a series of silk paintings depicting dancers, I spent the morning making a list of styles that I thought may be fun to paint. Of course, I found myself listing dance styles that my friends are involved in first.

I ended up with 16 specific styles of dance that I feel can be depicted through costuming, color, and body position. I probably won't end up painting all of these, but it's a good place to start. I then did a google image search for some of these dance styles and played around with my sketch pad.

I ended up with two finished sketches, one of a cancan dancer and the second of a burlesque dancer with huge ostrich feather fans - I feel that these fans are gorgeous, and highly evocative of this dance style. 
I knew that the fans would be the most difficult part of this piece to paint, so I started there, using a process similar to the flapper dress I worked on yesterday - washes of black dye and water applied liberally around and through the black streaks to fade and fan the color.

I chose orange and pink for the dancer's body, depicted her stage in browns and grays and painted the background red using water and the same black washes to fade vertical streaks through the red in order to make the background look like curtains.

Burlesque Dancer Silk Painting

She's super sexy - can't wait to see what's going to happen next in this series!