Dancing with Dad

When I made my last post about my "Faces of California" idea, little did I know that within three weeks I'd be in the hospital! I had already started the next painting in the series, but health issues intervened; I ended up with a bad outbreak of cellulitis on both my legs from ankle to knee, jumped through many ridiculous hoops trying to get treatment, and finally ended up hospitalized for five days, followed by about three months of recuperation. Although I came home after the five days, I was still on antibiotics for awhile, and my legs remained blistered and weepy for a long time. I was unable to sit up at the computer or the easel for more than half an hour at a time for about the first five weeks, so I made little to no progress on my painting.

Since then, I have worked on it in small increments, doing the shirt, the skirt, a face, over a period of several weeks. Then I got hung up on the background. I put in some furniture that would typically appear at this kind of occasion, but it was too detailed to be background, and it distracted from the subjects of the painting. I finally, after struggling with various iterations of it for a couple of weeks, asked advice of a friend, who counseled me to paint it out and replace it with a vague background of drapes and lights represented in the blurry distance/background.

I made it as far as restoring the plain yellow background, also redoing the floor in colors that dropped back (went from warmer to cooler tones), and got stuck again. I stared at the painting every single day for about a week, looking for inspiration, and finally concluded that all that was really lacking was bravery, so I finally put in a yellow curtain with white lights. I stared at that for a few more days and absolutely hated it. The background looked amateurish and too literal behind the more painterly figures. The colors (browns and mustard yellow) didn't work. 

I went to three more artist friends for advice. One commented on the layout and I realized she was right—it was too static, and it split the figures exactly in half, a big no-no. One pointed out some subtle colors in the darks and lights that I could add in for more nuance. One shared a video of an art teacher we both follow, and I took a good look at her backgrounds, which were "blurry" rather than being detailed, and substituted amorphous shapes for specific items. I decided to implement all of that. So I painted out everything I had done behind the figures, and then experimented on paper with where and what colors to use before committing it to the actual painting. I considering adding a little stenciling for a tile effect for the floor, but it didn't work, perspective-wise.

Again, I struggled with committing, and finally did the background as it is below, redoing and refining various effects until they worked for me (more or less).

After that, I fiddled with ideas for the cradle-board edges. Because I painted out the background so many times, I didn't do a "wraparound" of what was on the front except for the skirt on the bottom, so I thought that duplicating my success on the Strawberry Fields painting by using stenciling would be a good idea. I went through the ones I owned and tried out a couple on paper but again, nothing was quite right, so I ordered more stencils and waited for them to arrive. I tried a couple of versions and finally ended up doing some roses and leaves in strong colors and then glazing over them with pale pink to make them drop back so they didn't overwhelm the more subtle colors of the painting itself.

This is, without a doubt, the painting that has taken me the longest of any I have done, and I still can't say that I'm completely satisfied with it. I loved the idea, but feel like I haven't pulled off the execution quite as I envisioned it. But after more than four months of fiddling with it, I have decided to call it done and move on! I hope somebody out there likes it.

This painting represents a father-daughter dance at a Latina girl's Quinceañera, a traditional, lavish celebration of a rite of passage marking a girl's transition to womanhood on her 15th birthday. "Quinceañera: Dancing with Dad" is an acrylic painting of 16x20 inches on a cradle board. I plan to use this self-framing base for the entire "Faces of California" series. It's more expensive by far than buying flat wooden panels, but still more frugal than having to pay for framing—and has interesting possibilities for complementing the painting both esthetically and symbolically.

I can't finish this post without saying thanks to Phoebe, Corinne, Kim, and Emma for both their patience and their good suggestions. I don't often ask advice, but sometimes you need another opinion (or four), and my friends came through for me on this trainwreck. It really helps that they're all amazing artists. Thanks, y'all!

The faces

In light of what's going on in our country with the persecution of immigrants pretty much regardless of their status, I have become moved to paint some of the faces of Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is one of the most diverse cities in the world, representing more than 140 nationalities. The population is a mosaic of cultures, with no single ethnic group constituting a majority. Although the major ethnic groups are Hispanic/Latino (from Mexico and from South America), White, Asian, Black, and multiracial, the city acts as a hub for diverse communities, including significant Armenian, Filipino, Korean, Ethiopian, and Iranian populations. And each of these ethnicities and cultures brings with it a set of rich traditions, celebrations, foods, clothing and furnishing styles...almost anything you want to know about the people of the world you can find somewhere in Los Angeles. Nearly 40 percent of our residents were born outside of the United States, with more than 224 identified languages spoken in addition to English. Furthermore, 73 percent of the city's workforce are people of color.*

I wanted to include not just nationalities but also be sure to cover socioeconomic classes, genders, etc. And I wanted to share things that are unique and also things that are everyday.

I began last year with my paintings of the Latino woman and man ("Marigolds" and "Skullboy") wearing painted skull faces for Dia de los Muertos, and then ill health and the dark of winter kept me from making much progress. (I like to paint in natural light, which lasts about 90 minutes in my studio between mid-November and mid-January.) But I did some research in the meantime, and discovered David Bacon, a photographer of California field workers who agreed to let me use some of his photos as references for paintings, and I have just completed my first. It fulfills the goal of portraying the everyday, and also brings in gender—I think people may picture men when they think of field workers, but the women are out there too, under the hot sun, doing the backbreaking work that feeds California and significant parts of the States/the world via exports.

I slightly simplified the backdrop of the painting in favor of capturing the details of the two women standing in front of the fields in which they were picking strawberries. The portraits themselves were challenging because of the cast light and shadow, getting the complexions just right, and capturing their expressions. I decided that trying to paint the bandanas protecting their hair with the most common white/black patterns would detract from the faces themselves, so I left them as plain-colored scarves. I love that the one woman is wearing a "Cali" sweatshirt, since the series is all about Californians.

The biggest challenge on this one for me turned out to be the mixing of greens for the plants in the fields! I started out by using whatever greens I already had and then modifying them by adding yellows or blues or white, but they all came out muddy and nothing like what I was picturing. So I went back to basics, after asking some advice from painters better at color mixing than I am, and mixed all my greens from "scratch" using clear yellows and blues, then adding white or a touch of red. I'm still not completely satisfied with them—they don't feel either dark or bright enough for a strawberry field—but they are so much better than where I started that I decided to stop while I was ahead. I then added in miniscule dots of white and red to represent blossoms and berries.

I painted this on a cradle board so that it would need no framing, and I bought strawberry border stencils (two different ones) to use to decorate the sides. When they arrived in the mail, however, they both turned out to be too wide by almost an inch to use as they were configured (as one long, connected vine). So I broke them up into sections and just used "clumps" of leaves/berries/flowers spaced semi-evenly along the four sides. I had a little trouble with one side, but fortunately it was the bottom! So probably no one will ever look at it. Or (more likely) it will keep bugging me until I fix it! Each side is slightly different.

I'm calling this one "Strawberry Field(worker)s" and it's 16x12 inches, painted on cradle board with Golden acrylics.

I had a little trouble putting this together as a scan—my scanner cut off about half an inch at top and bottom and, since I have to scan it in two pieces, the split was right down the middle of the guy in the straw hat in the background, so fixing that wasn't perfect. And the color correction was difficult on this one. But...still better than a photo, I think.

I hope to continue on with this theme for a while with the thought of putting together a show or entering them in a competition.

*Population and nationality statistics from Wikipedia

First Let's Face It lesson of 2026

 This week the Let's Face It lessons started up, and the first one was a fun one, but done in a medium I don't enjoy and don't own: soft pastels. It's not that I don't admire them, I just don't have the patience, nor do I like having to use fixative on my art! So...I followed the lesson as far as I could (drawing it in vine charcoal, then going over that with a soft-leaded pencil and rubbing the charcoal out afterwards), and then, when I was supposed to continue by putting on layers of soft pastels in various colors, I instead broke out my palette, chose half a dozen colors of acrylic paints, and tried to mimic what our teacher, Toni Burt, did with her pastels. It sort of worked. It's a little too opaque here and there, but I did manage to be more spontaneous than I would with a straight portrait.

We were also supposed to draw someone without resorting to a reference photo, and I intended to, but I couldn't resist using the photo of Toni herself as a model. Maybe I will try another this week, and this time completely wing it.

"ToniLesson1_LFI2026"—vine charcoal, #6 pencil, acrylic paints, marking pens. 9x12 on coldpress watercolor paper.

My preference for Christmas Eve

 I haven't been able to talk anyone in my family into this, mostly because only a couple of them are real readers like I am , but this would be my ideal way to spend the holiday: Jólabókaflód—the Christmas book flood.

The founding story is here. But basically, the entire population of the country of Iceland buys books for one another as Christmas gifts, then they all open their gifts on Christmas Eve and promptly settle down on the spot to READ the books, accompanied by mugs of hot chocolate.

So yesterday I did a painting to promote the idea.

One bookstore I know of is celebrating this (on December 17th, not on the Eve), but since they are in Cleveland, I won't be able to attend. Anyone want to come over on Christmas Eve bearing a wrapped book and anticipating a quiet evening fueled by hot chocolate?

Uniball pen, watercolor, and Posca pens, 12x9 inches.

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.