Framing alternatives

I often paint things not considering such practicalities as framing. I have gotten better about taping off a border around my watercolors to provide an edge, but I am particularly bad about thinking these things through when it comes to acrylics. And since my favored surface is a thin birch board, I frequently end up with a "wall-to-wall" picture that might be diminished were some of it to be covered in an edging of frame.

I recently learned that if you paint on a "cradle board" you can eliminate the need for framing and also provide an extra interesting element to your painting. It's sort of the opposite of a shadow box—instead of being concave, where you look into it, it's convex with the flat surface standing away from the wall about 1.75 inches. I used one of these when I painted one of my Roseville-inspired floral still life pictures—I used a stencil to create a textured background, which was then mostly obscured by the subject itself and by a thin translucent layer of paint to knock back the effect and allow the subject to shine. But I then continued the stencil pattern around the four edges, and didn't knock that back, so that it blends with and yet stands out from the painting. I really like the effect.

Unfortunately, I didn't think ahead on my latest two paintings of the female and male celebrators of Dia de los Muertos. I painted them both on thin board, and then afterwards realized that there was, for instance, such a narrow margin of T-shirt neckline below the rebozo on "Marigolds" that it would disappear if framed. Further, I didn't care for the effects of framing on these particular paintings—I liked their starkness on that flat green background. So I decided that a workable solution would be to decorate the edges of a cradle board configuration and then simply glue these pictures to the front of that, thereby giving them a decorative edge and making them stand out from the wall.

Here is the result of the first one; I painted the edges and a small margin of the front of the board in the same paler pink I had used for the background of her rebozo, and then stenciled in the colors of that garment to give her a really bright "halo" of color that will only be seen from an angle, not straight on. I bought some Gorilla-brand wood glue and some small clamps and stuck her down to her "frame."

 

I'm now waiting for my order of a second cradle board (I only had one in the house) to arrive so I can do the same to "Skull Boy" (with different stencils and colors to complement his picture themes). But this experience will definitely teach me to think ahead; those cradle boards are expensive and therefore better used as intended, rather than simply as background mounts!

Skull Boy

It all started with that very particular shade of green paint that I created for her backdrop, from mixing Titan Green Pale with about a third of turquoise. After I touched up her background, I had enough left to put a coat on another board, and I like the color so much that I decided another background like that would be good, so I grabbed the next 12x12-inch board in my stack and slathered it with "my" green.

The problem was, I couldn't decide what to paint on it. It's such a particular shade that it needs the right thing; it almost acts as a "green screen" like in special effects, to pump up whatever you paint on that ground and make it pop. So I ultimately decided that she needed a friend, and embarked on research to paint "Skull Boy" to go with "Marigolds."

I ended up using the face (and facepaint) of one guy but the eye color, skintone, and haircut of another. I wanted him to look more Latino, and the initial reference photo was of a very pretty guy with bright blue eyes and collar-length red-gold hair, which didn't quite fit! So I found a more somber lad and stole his brown eyes and brush-cut black-brown hair, and also his old-cream shirt and black velvet jacket bespangled with silver braid.

At first I was a little worried that his facepaint outshone that of "Marigolds," but she has that crown of flowers coupled with the rebozo in bright colors and patterns to give her presence, so I went with a little more elaborate design on his face.

These are really difficult to paint; you have to get the skin color right and then coat it with the white in order for it to really look like a painted face, and however much I love that green, it's a pain to cover up—it shows through pretty much everything except black. So everything has multiple coats. The eyes were also hard to make just the right size and imbue with the perfect expression; at first they were too small, and now they are probably a tad too big, but I'm done messing with them!

I realized that I really don't want to frame these two, particularly her, because the thin rim of her shirt will disappear behind framing, so I have decided I'm going to get 12x12-inch cradle boards, paint the edges with marigolds and other Dia de los Muertos patterns, and glue these two to the fronts of them so that they stand out from the wall and are beautifully free-standing. (If only I had thought to put them on cradle boards in the first place...) That's the next project.

"Skull Boy"—acrylics and Liquitex silver on birch board, 12x12 inches.

GBBS

 My friend Kirsti, aka @sugarnerd, has turned me on to a new TV binge: The Great British Bake Off (known in the United States as The Great British Baking Show, since "bake-off" is, if you can believe it, a trademark owned by Pillsbury). It's apparently been around since 2010 but, although I have tuned in to a few baking shows, I had never seen it until Kirsti mentioned it and asked if I was watching the new season, so I decided to check it out. It's being carried on Netflix, although the earlier shows aren't available; it apparently starts there with Season 8, which is when BBC quit airing it and it switched over to Channel 4 overseas. It's a bit confusing, because Season 8 is listed on Netflix as Collection 5, and they continue being numbered from there.

It's similar to other baking shows, in that a group of amateur bakers compete against each other in a series of rounds, attempting to impress the two judges with their baking skills. The rounds consist of a "signature" challenge, which features something the person might bake at home for friends and loved ones; a "technical" challenge, which requires enough knowledge and experience on the bakers' part to produce a specific finished product (they all bake the same thing) when given limited instructions; and a "showstopper" challenge, where the bakers are given a specific request (bread, cake, etc.) but within that context must show off their skills and talent, focusing on both excellent flavors and dramatic presentations. At the end of each round (which consists of the first two challenges on a Saturday and the third on the Sunday), one contestant is crowned the week's "star baker," while another is eliminated. The winner of the season is selected from the three contestants who reach the final round.

Kirsti touted it as the perfect "cozy" way to spend an evening of television, and while the subject matter is certainly homey (who doesn't love baking?), the competition produces a high level of anxiety that keeps both contestants and viewers on tenterhooks. I started out thinking I wouldn't continue, but rapidly got hooked on the whole "what happens next?" of it all, and am still watching, two seasons later.

During the second season, both Kirsti and I had a favorite competitor and, after chatting about her on Messenger yesterday, this morning I decided to find a photo and paint her picture. Her name is Kim-Joy Hewlett, and she was one of the runners-up in Season 9 (Collection 6). When I first saw her on the screen, I questioned whether she had done her makeup as some kind of parody and then, realizing she had not, wondered why the production had let it stand! Her cheeks were a bright artificial pink, and she was wearing a heavy coat of sparkly turquoise cream eyeshadow. As the weeks went on she toned down her style just a tad, but still tended to reflect the color of her outfit on her eyelids and, since she wears a lot of yellow, that was usually a marigold shading into orange at the outer corners, with some equally vivid lipstick. 

But Kim-Joy's somewhat odd makeup choices were soon eclipsed by her skills; although she sometimes did poorly with the bake itself, her quirky, charming decorations often elevated her from the bottom of the roster to the top three. And her sunny disposition and shy grin likewise endeared her to viewers.

So, here is Kim-Joy, in all her glory, with rosy cheeks and yellow eye shadow (and dark brown hair tipped purple at this time), smiling and showing her dimple for the camera. (Her glasses were, contrary to my sketch, perfectly symmetrical!)

"Kim-Joy"—Uniball pen and watercolor on Bee sketchbook paper, 8x8 inches.

Rebozo and Marigolds

I ran across a reference photo of this girl, all made up, dressed up, and adorned with a marigold tiara for Dia de los Muertos, and there was something about the look in her eye and the quaint feel of her smooth hair and crowned head that appealed to me. And of course, I'm all about the color, so I traded in parts of her attire for something brighter and more fanciful by giving her this rebozo (a traditional Mexican scarf) to complete her outfit.

This was a challenging one to paint in some ways, in that there needed to be a face under all the paint that was "right" before the superficial decoration could be added. I repainted the eyes and the mouth a few times before I was satisfied, and then went on to the stark but beautiful "mask" she is wearing.

There were also some challenges with the clothing, because the rebozo is patterned, but there were shadows that had to look natural within the pattern.

Over all, though, this came together fairly easily, over a period of several days. I spent most of the third day just tweaking all the patterns and applying second coats of color over the white or the pink, to make sure it popped. I don't usually pursue photo-realism in paintings (particularly portraits), but this one somehow came out more real looking than usual, I think. Of course, I don't know how I did that, so I'm not sure I can duplicate it! Anyway...

This is "Marigolds," acrylics on a 12x12 thin birch board.

A different mood

I can't believe it's been six weeks since I last painted anything but a protest sign! I've been preoccupied with other stuff, but that's a long time to go without painting. I have had a couple of backgrounds prepped for a while, but this week I finally settled to something.

I tried again, with this one, to muster up some quality of a Malcolm Liepke painting, but once I finished it, it also felt to me like a painting from a former century, in some ways, with its dark atmospheric background and the more realistic focus on a face and body with less specific and more painterly clothing, so as to draw the eye to the personality.

This is, again, one of my favorite muses, Jenell Del Cid, @duhhcid on Instagram. I immediately fell in love with this pose, with her serious, slightly world-weary expression, all wrapped up in the giant fleece coat. In the portrait it comes off more like fur than it does fleece, but I didn't want to get more specific than this, because I felt it would be too itsy and also detract from the charisma of the model.

The background and the shadows are a mix of Ultramarine Blue Light and Payne's Grey, while the rest is a limited palette of Titan Mars Pale, Pyrrole Red, Titanium White, and some Raw Umber for the hair and eyes. I mixed a little gold into the eyes and highlighted the hair a tiny bit with some Titan Buff. But that's it.

When I was done with all that, something still felt lacking, so I scrubbed in tiny bits of Titan Green Pale, which is a muted celery color, and that gave it the Liepke touch; although it's hard to pick out if you look for it, it's ghosted over parts of both the skin and the fur.

This is "Fuzzy Jenell," acrylic on thin birch board, 12x16 inches.

Homage to an amazing artist

A while back, I discovered the artist Malcolm Liepke on Instagram (@malcolm_t_liepke), and was mesmerized by his figurative paintings and portraits. His skin tones are luminous, and most of them also incorporate beautiful and various shades of green and blue along with the more traditional cream-and-pink fleshtones. Every time he posts a new one, it becomes my favorite until the next. So I decided I would try to emulate him, while using my own particular signatures (stencils, acrylics) and picked out a reference photo posted by Instagram model @dinoopis to be its subject.

The background is a shade of mushroom, overlaid with a stencil pattern in turquoise, teal, and green and then knocked back with another thinned-out coat of a blue-green mix. I drew the figure, and then looked at Malcolm's pieces for inspiration. I had a false start when I first did all the shadows in shades of red oxide, cobalt violet, and raw umber, as I would normally do, and then tried to incorporate the other colors as well—it looked like a big messy mash-up of two separate people's styles, which indeed it was! So I blocked out all the browns and purples and replaced them with a mix of Payne's Grey and Ultramarine Light, and suddenly the rest of the colors popped out in a completely different way. It also made the hair, which is the only thing left in the red-brown spectrum, stand out, as redheads always should!

I wasn't brave enough, as it turned out, to make as much use of Malcolm's greens and turquoises as I originally intended, but...stages. And admittedly, I can't duplicate his glinting paint and popping white highlights, but that's partly due to medium (acrylics instead of oils) and mostly due to the substrate (birch board). The tradeoff for me is, I like the scrubby blended look you can get by painting on wood with a grain.

The shirt (or dress) she was wearing was black with white polka dots, but it was so folded and creased and gathered by being pushed down off her shoulders that the prospect of painting all those full dots, half dots, and quarter dots, as well as capturing highlights and shadows, became too fussy (and too daunting). So I elected to make her clothing a dramatic dark teal to go with the background shades, and then put in lights by adding Ultramarine Light to the teal, and the shadows by adding Payne's Grey, which also gave it unity with her skin tones.

The pose, with the tilted-up chin, and the configuration of her hand were challenging, but I think I mostly captured it. This is "Warm and Cool"—stencils and acrylics on thin birch board, 12x16 inches. (I don't love this title, so if you have a better suggestion, put one forth!)

This is the same model that I used for my "Surf the World" painting back in 2022. I still have a follow-up painting I want to do to go with that one, but it's a tall canvas (full-length standing figure) and I can't do it at my desk, so it may have to wait for an easel, which could be a while (nowhere to put it at the moment).

Tweaking an older work

I painted this figurative work in December of 2021, on spec for a potential client (who ended up not buying it after a lot of hemming and hawing). It was from an old photo of the client’s aunt and uncle-in-law, and she wanted it “in the style of Michael Carson”; I tried my best, but I didn’t quite get it. But I did duplicate the heavy light/shadow contrast that he goes for in his paintings, and I also captured their likenesses fairly well, given that I was working from an old, slightly blurred, colorized black-and-white photo. It was unfortunate that I got them a little high on the canvas so that his head is cut off a little, and I got their heads a bit too large for their bodies, but hey—it was my first figurative portrait in acrylic on canvas with two people in it, so...there.

In the photo, the belt on her dress is covered in white fabric, and for three years that white belt has bugged me. I initially liked it as another light point other than their faces, but after the painting sat in my studio staring at me for a while, I ultimately felt the eye was drawn too much to this insignificant detail. So, when I wanted to do some painting today but felt defeated when I looked at starting a whole new work, I decided instead to fix the belt. I made it a color to recede a bit into the dress, and gave it a gold metallic belt buckle to go with the gold in other parts of the painting, and I think it fits in a lot better. I also used the opportunity to add a few extra gathers in the dress and some strategic bits of shadow here and there.

I’m still sad the client didn’t like it, but maybe someday someone else will say, Hey, that looks like an old family portrait, it would go perfectly in my library! and I will sell it. Until then, Aunt Johnny and her George will keep staring down at me.

"AuntieUnc," acrylic on canvas, 18x24 inches. Available!