LFI assignment...

As usual, that's a "sort of." The painting was supposed to be done in oils, but I don't use that medium. So I decided to do a watercolor. The assignment was someone looking down and slightly to the side, so, in other words, a more difficult pose. The teacher did a self portrait, but I had been watching a charming movie (Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing and Charm School) on Prime, and was fascinated with the facial expressions of the actor Robert Carlyle. (You might know him better from The Full Monty, way back when.) So I switched from watching it on my TV to viewing it online so I could take a series of screenshots of him in various attitudes, and I managed to capture this one of him looking down in approximately the attitude we were supposed to capture for our assignment.

This is vastly overworked, and the colors are more intense than perhaps they should be in some areas, but I really tried to capture the shapes of the shadows and highlights rather than focusing specifically on the face itself. I don't know that I caught it, but I gave it my best shot.

"Frank" (the character's name)—pencil and watercolor on 140-lb. Fluid coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.

Beautiful substrates

The definition of a substrate in art is "a foundational or base material on which another material is applied or mounted." But the definition in biology is what I like to think of when creating one: "The surface or material on or from which an organism lives, grows, or obtains its nourishment." In other words, applying that one to art means that your figure in the forefront is growing organically from out of its background.

My mentor for creating substrates was and probably always will be Emma Petitt. She is the one who taught me to use a roller to apply random strokes of a variety of color to my ground, allowing them to cover, reveal, or blend with one another to create something special; and then, over the top of that (which can be plenty all by itself) I also discovered the joys of applying stencil images to highlight colors, shapes, and styles in service of the image I intend to paint over them.

I haven't done one of these in a while, being content instead to use more stark, one-color grounds in order to focus all the attention on the figure. But in some cases the rich background "grows" the figure from within it, and I'm hoping that's the impression this portrait ends up giving.

I call it "Nereid," which in Greek mythology is a kind of nymph, a female spirit of sea waters. In this one she has just burst from the water and is shaking her head, scattering drops everywhere as she sheds the excess.

I had some tough decisions to make on this one. I am not experienced in painting water, so although I initially considered painting a pool around the lower part of her, I was sufficiently in love with my substrate in order not to want to mess it up with something that might not look as realistic as I would have liked; I will practice that on some other painting without as much invested. I also couldn't decide, initially, whether I should paint her in much paler shades of white and cream with bluish/greenish highlights, like a fish that emerged from the deep. But I ultimately decided that nereids probably spend a bit of time in shallow waters or preening on rocks like the Little Mermaid, so I kept her in mostly realistic tones.

The light was interesting in this one, because it was sort of top down from right to left, so she has highlights and darks on both sides of her body. The perspective was also a challenge, with that upturned chin and nose, hidden forehead, and weirdly angled ear. Finally, I think i reworked that hand about five times, having trouble getting all the fingers the correct lengths and shapes and applying the highlights correctly. But I'm done...I think!

"Nereid"—pencil, acrylics, and stenciling on thin birch board, 12x16 inches.

More in the theme

Continuing very loosely with the same theme (goddesses? mythological characters? yeah, something like that), and with the same size and medium, I did go outside the color palette on this one, although there is still a tiny bit of each of the colors (Cobalt Orchid, Light Ultramarine, Red Oxide) in this one. But my primary objective was to use this beautiful and subtle Titan Green Pale from Golden Acrylics as a background for a goddess of equally subtle coloring: Ngame, the West African moon goddess. Ngame created the heavenly bodies and brought life and soul into every living thing with her beams. She is known as the White Goddess, according to Robert Graves, and is also considered a muse, a patroness of creative inspiration, so it seemed appropriate to make a painting of her!

As my model I chose someone I have painted once before, the beautiful Diandra Forrest. I first cast her (in watercolor with an acrylic background) as Akata Witch from Nnedi Okorafor's book, back in 2022, but for that painting I used a much younger reference photo (the character in the book is 14). But for Ngame I chose a mature photo, although I still went with the free-flowing shock of hair rather than the short cut or the long braids she sometimes wears.

I started out uniformly pale and then integrated subtle bits of all the colors, one by one, into the painting. As an albino person Diandra's skin tone is a very particular tint: It's not pink, not olive, but rather a distinctive shade of creamy white, with underlying green, blue, and lavender tones, and the shadows look brown, rather than gray. It's both fun and challenging to paint.

I enjoyed playing with a new tool to get her hair just right: I had ordered some plastic scrapers meant to be used with Gelli plates that one of my Let's Face It teachers had recommended for making stripes or patterns in oil paint, and I used one of them to "scumble" the colors together and put some texture into her soft cloud of hair.

The green is an unusual color to use for background when depicting a moon goddess in front of the full moon (one automatically thinks black, deep blue, gray, or sunset colors), but there is that moment just before dusk when the sky isn't quite blue or gray when you might see this shade in it, and I decided it was okay to accentuate that a bit. I did try glazing over it with light ultramarine, but it didn't really work, so I wiped off most of it, just leaving some to be the darker shadows on the surface of the moon.

I thought about adding some gold medium onto the moon, like I did in my last few portraits (as halos), but decided it would take away from the primary focus (Ngame), so I left it off.

"Ngame"—acrylics on thin birch board, 12x16 inches.

(Note: My scanner cut off a bit of the top left corner and also a tiny strip of her shoulder on the right—the original doesn't have the moon falling off the page up there quite as much, and also shows more of her arm. I have to do these in two pieces and put them together in Photoshop Elements, since my scanner bed is 9x12 and these are 12x16.)

Sort of a theme?

I continued this week with using the same color palette and with exploring mythological themes for a new painting. I had a vague recollection of reading one worldview in which the Moon is a Triple Goddess, with the waxing (growing) moon being the maiden, the full moon as the mother, and the waning moon representing the crone. Although I wasn't entirely comfortable with the symbology—are middle-aged women only worthwhile if they are mothers? and are crones really "waning" or diminished in some way? I think not. Nevertheless, the idea, preoccupied as I was last week by the maiden portrait of Proserpine, stuck in my head, and then I came across a reference photo that seemed like a cross between a goddess and a saint, subject of the portrait I painted before that one (Saint Side-Eye), so I decided I could take this vague legend and make something fun from it, even if I disagreed with its characterizations.

The result is this woman in the full flush of the middle of her life, cheerfully giving a blessing. I dressed her in the red oxide color I've been using, thinking of a Blood Moon, and gave her a necklace that harks back to an early witchy symbol for the three-part goddess. And then, just for fun, I also gave her a halo of sorts. (I thought about hanging a blood moon in the upper left corner, but finally decided it was too literal, and maybe also overkill. But...?)

The painting went smoothly until I got to the decorative bits. I did an undercoat of the red oxide on the necklace before putting on the gold metallic acrylic medium, because in the painting of Saint Side-Eye I liked the effect of the red peering through the gold, and I thought it would go nicely with her dress; but for some reason it was harder to get the gold to cover the red here. It also looked flat, which was perfect for the saint's halo but not for a necklace, so I ended up giving it some highlights and dark edges with regular paint.

I didn't want to undercoat the halo red first, because it would be too stark against the light ultramarine background, so I went in directly with the gold paint over the blue, but it didn't work at all. Then I decided to put a film of white paint over it, but that just killed the glow. So I coated it again with the gold over the white, but that was splotchy and looked like she had made herself a homemade halo out of a paper plate or something. So I went back in with the blue background color and, instead of an unbroken perfect halo, I did a sort of "rays" effect with alternating blue and gold, so that it became an extension of her blond hair. I'm not completely happy with it, but I think it works okay.

The only other element with which I had a problem was her gaze. In the reference photo it is a direct look at the viewer, but no matter how conscientiously I tried to duplicate it, I couldn't get her to look at me! I have noted this problem before, and still haven't figured it out. I would have liked the portrait much better if I could have achieved it here, though, as she had such a friendly, cheerful, intimate glance.

This is "Selene"—acrylics and gold medium on thin birch board, 12x16 inches.

Old medium, new technique

Lat week's LFI2024 lesson was with watercolorist Unyime Edet, and it was an adventure in using a familiar medium in an unfamiliar manner. First and foremost, he paints with a flat brush, which I have never done in watercolor—the general approved method for watercolor is round, with a point. Second, he paints the darks first, layering up to the light instead of starting light and adding in the darks in layers. It's challenging to save the whites when you work like this, but it also gives dramatic contrasts. I also liked that he noted the actual colors you use don't matter, it's more about capturing the values, dark to light. I follosed his lead in using a deep purple for the darks, and I think it worked well.

The reference photo he used for the lesson didn't appeal to me that much, so I decided to be my usual impudent self and paint the teacher instead. This is my rendition of Unyime, using his flat-brush technique and starting with the darkest darks on the left side of his face. I lost some of the whites and lights I wanted to save, but overall I was surprised at how effective it can be to paint with a flat brush, defining planes rather than blending. I didn't do his technique justice, but I made a start on it, and his was a fun image to capture.

"Unyime"—pencil and watercolor on coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.

Classical imagining

In my leisure reading this past week was a reference to Persephone (in the Greek) or Proserpina (Roman), the ostensible reason for seasons on Earth. Since seasons are much on my mind (my heater still doesn't work and it's COLD in this house), I dwelt a little longer on the legend than I normally would, and it inspired a portrait. Since the color palette in my last one was so successful, I thought it would be fun to use similar tones in this one, perhaps creating a series. They don't really go together that much, given that the subject in the last one had dark, warm, rich skin tones and is portrayed as a saint, and the subject for this one is about as pale as a white girl can get and comes from Greek/Roman myth; but I used the eggplant color (Cobalt Orchid) from Saint Side-eye's shirt as the background here, and picked up the rust color (Red Oxide) from the saint's background in this one's hair and the fruit in her hands.

Lest you have forgotten the legend, Hades, lord of the underworld, has a crush on Earth Mother Demeter's daughter, Persephone, and kidnaps her. Demeter loses her shit and quits minding the climate, with the result that things on earth die and freeze—generally not so great for the populace. So her daddy, Zeus, tells Hades to return their daughter, but because she ate some pomegranate seeds while downstairs, Hades is able to enforce at least a partial stay with him every year. During those four months when she is being queen in the underworld, Demeter mourns and the earth experiences winter; when she returns topside, temps warm, flowers bloom, the ground produces a bountiful harvest, and Mommy is happy. A little more dramatic story than Punxsutawney Phil, and vastly more paintable!

Although most of the classical pictures portray her as more mature, wearing formal dress and a diadem, she is always described as a maiden and, as the story goes, she is "playing" in a field of flowers with her nymph buddies when Hades makes off with her. So I chose to paint her as a young, fresh-faced girl—sweet, but maybe a little awkward and not quite a woman yet. She traditionally has either blonde or red hair and blue eyes, so the color scheme I had chosen worked for the hair. Rather than a fancy dress with a jeweled bodice, as she usually wears, I put her in a simple shift the color of a Luna moth to signify spring; she is holding the pomegranate that was her downfall.

For some reason, this is one of the hardest portraits I have painted to date. Part of the reason is that because I am working in a familiar size and format (12x16) but portraying most of her torso, everything was a little smaller than I usually work (facial features in particular), but that doesn't entirely account for the difficulty. I think I just didn't know where exactly I was going with this one, so it simply took longer and required some decisions that I ended up taking back. The narcissus is "her" flower, so I thought I'd paint one tucked into her headband, but I knew it was a mistake the minute it was finished—it completely drew focus from her face and the fruit in her hands, which are the dual points of the entire portrait. So I sanded it with some fine sandpaper to take off the raised paint and restored it to flowerless simplicity.

I think that deep orchid color works great to signify that she's in the underworld, and the white and light blue highlights on the dress and headband make her glow.

"Prosperpina"—acrylics on thin birch board, 12x16 inches. (I prefer this name, in the end, to Persephone, because when I was a kid I read it out loud literally as "Percy-fone" and was embarrassed when I found out I was wrong!)

Let's Face It lesson...kinda

This week's Let's Face It 2024 lesson was with the adorable Misty Segura-Bowers. She did it in oil, but those of us who prefer acrylic were encouraged to use that. I picked a fairly limited palette, though not as limited as Misty's, and followed basic procedure, but ended up changing the final product a bit. I used my own reference photo instead of hers, and rather than making it 12x12, mine is 12x16, because I wanted the opportunity to isolate the space around the head from the space around the body so I could have some fun with it.

I have painted from this specific reference before, in my Deb Weiers-inspired phase back two years ago right after I took her class, but that was a whole different kind of fun from this one!

Misty used Cadmium red as her base and then did a thin overlayer of raw umber, but I had just bought an enticing color called Red Oxide, which came out a few shades darker, so I painted my background with that. (I also don't like using Cadmium colors, even though they say the level is so low in paint that it's not toxic. Why risk it?)

Misty used a grid and sketched in the figure upside down with raw umber, filling in sections as she went; I don't really like working with a grid (it's a pain to remove it when you're done using it), so I did a rough outline trace using white pan pastel, and then free-handed the rest.

This was a challenging portrait in many ways. Painting a darker complexion on top of a very dark background meant it was hard for me to see the contrasts, so I kept getting things either too light or too dark and having to color-correct. In doing so, I lost some of the spontaneity of my earlier marks. The best part of the portrait may be her shirt, because I painted that quickly and using broad strokes, without fussing too much with blending or defining.

Her bald head was also difficult, because part of the darker shadows on the back-side of her head are actually a faint fuzz of hair growing in; but I didn't want to get itsy with that, so I made it smooth. I had a few false starts, too, with how light the lightest lights should be against the rest, and using what color; I started out with more of a Naples yellow, but it didn't look right, so I switched over to Titan Mars Pale, mixed with a little burnt umber. The darkest darks in this thing were supposed to be raw umber, but I discovered I was out (how did I let myself run out of that essential color?!), so I mixed the burnt umber with some Cobalt violet and a teensy bit of Payne's gray and made do. All of this was made more subjective because the reference photo is in black and white! (Misty's was, too, and I thought I should play by that rule on mine, even though it was a different model.)

The gold halo is a Liquitex metallic medium. I really wanted to add this, but I'm not sure whether I thus ruined the painting. I did like the simplicity of it before, but I had this idea of giving it an iconographic feel, so I went for it. Parenthetically, someday I would like to try gold leaf instead. I used gold leaf way "back in the day" (i.e., in the misty past of my 20s) when I did illumination and rubrication on calligraphy manuscripts, but I have only ever used it in tiny bits (on ornamental capitals and borders) and on paper; doing large areas on a board will, I think, be another challenge. I aspire to doing something more interesting than this flat circle—more along the lines of the awesome Stephanie Rew!

Anyway, here she is. I named her Saint Side-eye. Golden acrylics and metallic medium on thin birch board, 12x16 inches.