Elusive likenesses

Sometimes, when making a portrait of someone, you get everything so close to right—the shape of the face, the tilt of the eyes, the squareness of the jaw, the color of the cheeks—and yet...it's just not them. That was my quandary today, when trying to do a portrait of my friend Bix for her birthday. It was an impulsive attempt (her big event snuck up on me during these quarantine days that all feel pretty much the same), and I perused a lot of photos from her Facebook page, trying to find one that had the perfect Bixxy personality.

It was hard to find a good one, not because she's not photogenic (she is), but because in 99 percent of her photos she has her face affectionately pressed up to someone else's—a friend, a student, most often one of her three beautiful children (who all look like their mum). She's a popular one! The photo I found was another like that, but with the face turned forward enough that I could extract the other person and still make it work. But...it doesn't, quite.

Happy Birthday, my friend—I'll try another one sometime and see if I can't better capture the essence of Bix!

Uniball pen, Paul Jackson watercolors, in Bee Sketchbook.