Just because

This one isn't for any lesson, I just painted it because I kept coming back to the photograph wanting to paint it! I was going to turn it into something uniquely mine by making her a Raggedy Ann doll with a blue-and-white checked dress and white collar (which would actually be consistent with Jenell's love of costume and dress-up), but when it came down to it I wasn't feeling that, so instead I went with dark and unobtrusive for the shirt (in the reference photo she was wearing a cream-colored sweater) so that her face would really stand out amongst all the red and burgundy and purple.

This whole thing came together deceptively easily—I spent a couple of hours on Thursday and again on Friday, and thought I had finished it last night—but when I got up this morning and looked at it, I saw that I had somehow managed to skew the mouth so it was too straight, too far to the right, and not lined up properly with the other features, and the nose was slightly off its proper angle as well. I showed it to my friend Corinne and she gave it a pass, but I knew it would bug me if I left it, so I fixed the nose (that was a tiny correction) and then painted over the mouth, let that dry, and started in to replace it.

Four mouths later...I kid you not. For some reason, getting the correct angle and the proper formation of the lips and the proportion of left to right required by the tilt of the head was simply impossible for my brain to comprehend. I finally ended up with something that worked okay for me—better than it had been before in terms of fitting with the rest of the face—but it's still not as similar to the original as I was hoping.

It is, however, a fairly good likeness of Jenell over all, and I'm happy with the simple yet crazy red hair and the way the rest of it fades back, so I'm calling it done!

"Raggedy Jenell"—chalk and acrylics on thin birch board, 12x12 inches.

Petitt Special

This week's lesson was with my beloved friend and mentor Emma Petitt, a three-quarter-length figure with hands, using stylized patterning. Emma always makes it look and sound so easy—"Just give a little sweep of your brush here," "Splodge it on, make it chunky, don't focus on likeness or perfection," and so on, spit-spot-done. Yeah, right, Emma. This thing took me more than seven hours, and it's not even close to what I wanted it to be, but...it was good practice for me to try some different techniques, whether successful or not in this particular painting, so I'm calling it finished.

Emma is famous for her huge feet, outsize legs, and spidery long fingers (in her paintings, not on her own body! Ha!). I didn't go quite as far as I should have with the fingers, with the result that instead of looking purposefully elongated and distorted, they just look kinda wrong. She also almost never paints features on her women, preferring to leave the face a blank so that people focus on the other fanciful parts of their physique and clothing, but I find blank faces a little creepy sometimes, so I added one on mine. (Also, I liked the looks of the reference model and wanted to duplicate some of her characteristics.)

The spontaneity of this, adding in the lemons and leaves wherever they felt necessary while changing the style of dress and substituting headgear, was a useful exercise for me, as was painting around things to put in both the background and the ground color of the dress. I know that I tend to be way too literal with duplicating every bit of the reference photo when I paint, so departing radically from that was good, even if I was following Emma's lead and not doing it strictly on my own.

I did substitute lemons for oranges in mine, mostly because my lemons are all ripe and falling off the tree in my back yard right now, which kept them in the forefront of my brain, but also because I ran out of orange paint while doing the underpainting (a combination of orange and violet) but still had several shades of yellow and gold in my palette.

I also didn't use the same proportions, as I didn't have a canvas as large or as long and narrow as the one Emma used. But I still managed to capture most of the figure.

Here is the reference photo, just for purposes of comparison, since seeing it showcases how Emma starts with an idea but then radically departs from the inspiration photo.

This is "Lemon Dressing"—pencil and acrylics on a thin birch board, 12x16 inches.  Note that this is cropped a little due to the size of my scanner bed—there's a little more blue space at the top above the arm, and more of the cut-off lemons on either side as well.

Another pose

No matter what source material I look at these days, I seem drawn back to various personalities and poses created by Jenell Del Cid, perhaps because she oh-so-accommodatingly does lots of fun photo layouts with creative wardrobe and makeup choices almost every day on her Instagram page, inspiring me to keep painting her.

This one is from a photo I saved a while back, and I was all set to use it when someone else in my LFI class did a rather perfect painting from it and stopped me in my tracks. But this week, after looking fruitlessly through a bunch of other ideas and not feeling inspired by them, I decided to come back to this one. After all, when we all do the lessons on LFI, there are about 2K of us painting from the exact same reference photo, so why should I let one painting deter me from making my own? Also, Louise Thorpe and I have somewhat different styles, so mine will be my own expression according to my peculiar choices.

That said, you could characterize this as a follow-up to the first week's lesson from Kara, given that that lesson inspired me to try to continue painting more loosely, with more painterly "chunks" left to stand on their own instead of being obsessively and seamlessly blended into everything around them. I believe this is improving my paintings, and am quite pleased with this one, although I struggled a bit with the likeness.

(Sometimes my favorite part of a painting is one of the stages, like this one in which she is starting to appear like a ghost out of the background.)

I got the eyes a little too large and wide-open—Jenell's are a bit more languorous in the photo—but I do love their direct gaze. I had fun with color in this one too, doing the highlights in her dark hair in an intense turquoise instead of a lighter shade of the hair color. And the background worked for me too—I started out with Cobalt Violet, but it was too dark, so I moved to a Light Violet, with Light Ultramarine glazed over it in discernible strokes and then some white at the end to give a cloudy effect.

The hardest part of this entire painting was that damn flower around her neck—I struggle with accurately duplicating things with this many disparate parts, and also with conveying the texture or material from which they are made. I know that sounds crazy, given that most people have more difficulty with portraiture than with anything; but I have had a lot of practice these past five years, and that part is beginning to be second nature.

"Jenell with Flower," pencil and acrylics on thin birch board, 12x12 inches.

LFI lesson #1 of 2025, with Kara

 This week's first lesson in Let's Face It 2025 was with Kara Bullock, owner/artist of Kara Bullock Art School, physically based in Tustin, California, but the online source of almost all my art instruction since just before the pandemic commenced. The Let's Face It class is a year-long intensive of portrait-painting instruction, one lesson per week (sometimes two, if there are bonus lessons) with different portrait artists in many media. I tend to stick to my two of choice (watercolor or acrylics), and do the lessons from my own perspective, but I nonetheless learn a lot by watching and listening to other painters as they share their methods.

Kara paints with much more spontaneity and much less blending than I do, which is something to which I have aspired ("be more painterly" is a constant refrain in my head), so it's always fun to see if I can emulate her methods. I don't, however, enjoy painting from the same reference as the other couple thousand people taking the class, so I tend to look for one with a similar vibe and then use the methodology to create my own piece. So this week, even though I did like the reference photo she chose, I found one with the same upturned eyes on the Instagram of the incomparable model @duhhcid, Jenell Del Cid, whose portrait I have painted half a dozen times now and who is one of my favorite models.

Kara works with an underpainting (she usually uses Burnt Umber Light), so I decided to do one too, but I used Red Oxide instead, because I wanted something warmer. It initially made me a bit crazy, because everything I painted over the top looked too light and bleached out against the relatively dark surface; but I kept working, and I ended up really happy with the glow it gave to the entire painting. It warmed up the skintones, kept the hair from looking flat, and made a wonderful undertone for the background color, which is a combination of Ultramarine Blue, Titan Green Pale, and a tiny bit of Naples yellow.

Here is Jenell in all her attitudinous, messy-haired glory. Thanks, Kara, for a great lesson! "Messy Jenell," acrylics on thin birch board, 12x12 inches.

Redoing (improving?)

I painted a portrait back in 2022 and had all kinds of trouble with it. Pictured in a sepia-toned daguerreotype was a romantic young woman with one hand pressed to her chest, but the hand as pictured in the reference photo wasn't attractive. Since my ambition at the time was a realistic, accurate portrayal, I painted it as is; but it was both ugly and unconvincing, despite being just like the photo. I then went online and found a photo with another hand pressed to another chest, and I painted out the original and subbed in the new one. It looked better, but I was never satisfied with it. It just didn't seem to "rest" where it was placed, and felt like an afterthought—not my goal! The more I looked at it, the more it felt like a zombie arm attached at an awkward angle.

I also disliked the background I had created. She was pale with dark hair, and in the original she was against that dark backdrop, but I didn't want her hair to disappear into that. So I made a background using a rather raucous shade of green overlaid with a rose pattern stenciled in pale yellow. As soon as I had done it, I felt that it fought with the portrait for attention and regretted my choices, but I didn't believe I could paint over the background because of the stenciling texture. Also, at that time I was all about finishing up and moving on to the next something, so I left it be. I even put it up for sale in my Etsy store, but had no takers

This past week I was inspired by my artist friend Phoebe, who doesn't hesitate, if she decides she is dissatisfied with something she has painted, to give it a complete makeover. Sometimes I think what she has done is a transformative improvement, while other times I liked it better before she started—but I have to admire the courage with which she jumps in to radically alter something she has created. One of the things I've been talking about lately is to be braver and also less precious about my work, so I took another look at this painting and decided to see if I couldn't make it better/more satisfying.

First, I mixed a medium pink with some Payne's Grey to create a mid-value pinkish-violet color, and painted over the green/yellow stenciled background. That color still seemed a little intense, so next I glazed over it using some of my new favorite Golden color, Titan Green Pale, which is a barely-there green reminiscent of celery. I liked that, but it felt too light to me, so I decided to use some Cobalt Violet to see if I could, using a dryish stencil brush, just hit the tops of the painted-over stenciling to get a gentle echo of the tight pattern of roses.

I don't think I quite succeeded in recovering discernible roses, but I did get a nice dappled darker violet texture over the surface of the rest, and I decided it would work.

I then turned my attention to the figure. First I mixed up some Naples Yellow and white to cover the part of the arm pressed against her dress, which was about that color; and then I mixed some Titan Mars Pale to cover the hand where it lay across her chest and squeezed out some Red Oxide to cover the hand where it crossed the ribbon trim. I had to do two coats of all of these to get rid of the hand and arm, and then I pulled up the original photo and tried to paint and shade the dress the way it appeared in the reference, but sans arm. I shaded things with some Raw Umber and a little Cobalt Violet. Finally, I went back into the face and hair and made them just a tad more dramatic. Although there isn't a lot of shadow in the reference photo, I decided it could use a little extra oomph.

Here is my girl Rose, fixed for the third and hopefully final time. I think she works better now; what do you think?

"Rose Renewed"—acrylics on thin birch board, 12x15 inches.

Roseville collection

I decided I wanted to do another in the Roseville vase/flowers series, but this time with a much smaller vase. So instead of using a 12x16-inch board, I went with a 12x12 cradle board. I knew I wanted to use my tiny Columbine vase in the blue-green shades, and to fill it with blue Plumbago from the bush in my front yard, but I wasn't sure what else I wanted to include.

Going with those themes, I thought about background and stenciling, went through my collection, and ended up painting the cradle board a warmish mushroom brown color as a ground (Raw Umber + White + Titan Green Pale). Then I stenciled flowers and leaves in tight patterns all over the face of the cradle board in shades of turquoise, light Ultramarine blue, Titan Buff, and Prussian blue. I gave that 10 minutes to dry, and then glazed over all of it with Titan Green Pale, a barely-there celery shade, to back off the strong colors of the stenciling and mute the mushroom background as well. This time I was going for more of an overall wallpaper effect.

 

Upon consideration, I decided I would also stencil the edges of the cradle board with the floral theme in the same colors, but would not glaze over them, allowing them to be a more distinctive iteration of the pattern as a sort of frame to the whole. That was a bit challenging—I had to hold the cradle board at an angle, while holding the stencil in place with the same hand and pouncing over the stencil with the other hand. I had one side that didn't turn out too successfully, so I figured I'd just put that one on the bottom! In the end I glazed the four sides as well, just to tone down and blend the colors together, although I left them a bit stronger than the treatment for the background itself, which I glazed over twice.

I'm afraid I have seen the best of the plumbago for the season, and there was very little left by the time I finally got around to cutting it (also, my pruning-mad gardener has been at work!), so I added in a few small white roses to fill out the bouquet. The columbine on the face of this vase is less yellow and more cream-white, so that seemed to work.

I always take a photo of the vase of flowers I'm planning to paint, because the flowers deteriorate daily once they are cut, even well supplied with water and in the cool temperature inside my house (no heater yet), so I need the static reference. I'm especially glad of that this time: When I got up the next morning after I cut the flowers and put them in the vase, the plumbago had already wilted and folded in on itself, so I was especially reliant on my photo to make the painting.

I suffered a fair amount of frustration getting ready to paint this: I first tried drawing with pencil, but it didn't show up over the busy background, so then I had the idea of doing a tracing using pan pastels. I printed the photo at the size I wanted to work, applied dark gray pan pastel to the back of it, and then taped it to the cradle board and penciled firmly over the picture outlines. But when I took the picture off, the tracing hardly showed at all! I wiped it clean and tried with a bright orange color, and that was even worse. White pan pastel didn't work either. I finally went back to the pencil, and made do, but this one was more reliant on eye-balling pretty much everything but the shape of the vase and a few flowers and leaves that managed to stand out against the background. It ultimately turned out okay, but I spent a lot more time than usual being fussy and adding more details as I went.

Ironically with these paintings, it always seems to be the surface (table top or whatever) and the shadow that are the most challenging parts of all, even though you would think you could just slap them down in 15 minutes or so. I painted and repainted this surface, going darker, then glazing lighter again, until I got it to a color and texture that read against the background without being too obtrusive; and then I redid the shadow about eight times, introducing more raw umber and prussian blue as I went and moderating it with a little of the Titan Green Pale.

This one is really about the textures, and I'm happy with the amount of show-through on the background and also with the more painterly, slightly less precise vase and flowers. The subtle colors worked just the way I wanted them to, and the cradle board, with the sides showing the pattern, will be beautiful when I hang it on a wall. I may have to keep this one for myself!

"Plumbago Columbine," stencil, pencil, and acrylics on wooden cradle board, 12x12 inches.

She Can Fly!

One of my goals this coming year is to expand from simple shoulders-up portraits with an occasional hand in the picture to partial- or full-figure paintings. Of course, the plan included the idea that by now I would have cleared out my studio to make room for an easel on which I could paint much larger pieces, because doing full-figure means you either work smaller on the same size canvas, or keep working at the size you like, and expand to a bigger background. But...my studio is NOT cleared out, and I don't have room for my easel, so I decided I'd get a jump-start on the year by trying one at my typical size, which is 12x16 inches. And not to be timid about it, the reference I chose has not one but three people in it. They're children, but still...three! And they're not tiny children, they're probably 11 or 12 years old, so, yeah.

I found the photo online of a whole group of girls watching an older girl do something that was, to them, amazing, and someone caught them all with their mouths open and expressions of shock or surprise on their faces. The person doing the demonstration wasn't in the picture, so one could only speculate, but the girls are dressed like either dance pupils or gymnasts, and the photo was labeled "She Can Fly!" I cropped out all but three of the girls, picking the ones with different stances, heights, hairstyles, and body types to get as much variation as possible. (Here on the right is the rest of the photo that was cropped out.)

I chose to paint them as ballet students, so I tried to give the vague background the feel of a dance studio without getting too picky. I also gave them all the quintessential pale pink tights and black leotards worn by little ballet girls everywhere. This immediately became a challenge, because in the photo the girls are bare-legged, and some of their outfits are not one-piece black leotards but two-piece shorts-and-tank combos. Oh, and just to up the challenge, the reference photo was in black and white, so there was a lot to extrapolate.

I first made the mistake of painting their legs just as they appeared, but that made them look bare-legged, so I went back and glazed over all the shading with another couple of thin coats of Titan Mars Pale (sort of a skin-tone pink made by Golden) to get the legs to look like they were covered in fabric. The problem is, all the girls are also caucasian, so their actual skin tones would likewise be pinkish. I tried to give a bit of nuance, both by adding some Naples Yellow to the mix and by going strong with the shadows in Cobalt Violet and accentuating their reddened cheeks. I also decided to give a little variation to them by only painting one of the three as blonde (even though all three had light hair), making the middle one a "ginger" and the one on the right a brunette. I felt like since they were identically dressed and had extremely similar coloration, that was the only way to distinguish them.

Although I discovered with my last painting that I prefer working on thin birch board (with the bit of texture it provides) rather than on slick, ultra-smooth artist's panel, I might have done better to use the latter on this painting since the smaller you work, the harder it is to paint the details, and that bit of wood grain meant some imprecision. And since the reference photo was also quite blurry, getting things right became even more of a challenge—particularly those open mouths. It was hard to tell from the fuzzy photo whether there was actually tongue showing or not, and I repainted both the stretched lips and the interior of the mouths several times over on each of the girls.

My final challenges were environmental: The hydrolics in my desk chair are beginning to give up the ghost, and keep dropping to a level at which my knees are actively uncomfortable after just a short period of sitting; but I couldn't paint for long in one day anyway, because of the low winter light. I only have one working artificial light source in my studio at the moment (all the plugs are behind big furniture and thus hard to rearrange), and the afternoon light coming through the window has been significantly diminished both by the time change and by the season. Basically, I only have good light from about 1:00 to about 3:30, and that's if it's sunny outside rather than overcast. So this painting has taken me an inordinate amount of time to finish, because every time I'd get going, the light would go away.

Basically, rather than call this "She Can Fly," I should have titled it "Exercise in Frustration." But I'll stick with the more positive message.

Pencil, gesso, and acrylics on thin birch board, 12x16 inches.