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!

Mustering defiance

I have been feeling the need to paint a new rabble-rouser for our current situation. I sold my painting "Keep Going" to someone who herself needed some encouragement and said the painting invoked her gumption, so I wanted to create a new image for myself. Given that I can't march like I used to, this is what I can do. Maybe I will offer her on a T-shirt for people who feel this message.

I looked for reference photos of women with raised fists and expressions of anger, determination, some kind of intense engagement. Although the one I used was quite supermodelish, I think I managed to transform her into a more authentic image by the choices I made in my painting with style and colors.

I went through quite a number of changes on this one. The T-shirt in the photo was white, but I didn't want it drawing focus from the face and fist, so I dialed it back with color but then gave it some pattern (a stencil, in case you were wondering—no, I am incapable of painting stars that perfectly or evenly!) just for added detail. I put in the lettering at the top but then the big empty space below it felt awkward, so I also used the stripes from my flag stencil to fill it in and give more nuance. I had to repaint the jacket sleeve a couple of times because, in the reference photo, both the jacket and the background were red, a red so similar that it was hard to distinguish foreground from background; but with the help of my painter friend Corinne I figured it out.

Her eyes were a bit squintier than this, and her mouth not at quite this angle, but I'm letting it be, because if I fuss too much, I inevitably make it worse! 

I pondered for a while whether the message should be "save our" or "take back our," but concluded that at this point, a lot has slipped away, and I also liked the thought that we could revert to the pure form originally invoked by the Constitution rather than simply salvaging what we have had recently, which hasn't felt ideal even before the fascists took over. It's eye-opening to read comments from all over the world and realize that many viewed American politics as a totally corrupt shit-show long before that became apparent to us. We obviously haven't been paying enough attention for all the decades since the gates were opened to so many devious people with destructive ideas (for everyone but them). But we're paying attention now.

I'm calling this "Blue in the Face" because that's how I'm feeling right now—screaming until I am blue in the face, and who is listening? This is a pastel drawing followed by acrylic paints on a 12x16-inch thin birch board. (Note: My scanner cuts off almost 1/2 inch on either side. The borders aren't this tight.)

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.