There are certain people who are so hard to capture that I keep trying. My pal Kirsti is one of them. So I decided that the Deb Weiers method might be how I finally get at the essence of the person without a perfect likeness, and started snooping through her Facebook photos for "the one." She did end up giving me great inspiration, although it was her costume and makeup job that beckoned this time. I also gave her a little friend. He's fierce, but loyal.
On this one, I painted the background colors first (not the black, that came later), but I looked at the reference photo and put the colors in approximately the correct areas from the start. After it dried, I drew in the faces with pencil and did some preliminary painting before ever going in with drawing ink, which is a switch from my usual method but maybe works better? (I did much the same thing on "Portrait of Rosemary.") I had great fun embellishing this one, although I mostly stuck to the makeup job Kirsti had already painted on for Dia de los Muertos. The roses were also entertaining—while the paper was wet with the red ink, I took the hard end of the paintbrush and swirled it around to make rose shapes in the ink so I would have some guidance and texture when it dried.
The background was flat black at first, but I added some "stars" to alleviate its starkness. The border was white (I FINALLY remembered to mask off a border so there is room to frame, instead of painting all the way out to the edges), but I had a little bleed-through at the corners so I painted it a soft pinkie-orange and added a black line around all, and some corners, extending the stars outward. I also added some gold spots to the crow that mimic the ones around her eyes.
Daler Rowney inks, watercolor, white and black gesso, pencil, gel pens, Uniball, LuminArté gold paint, on Strathmore 140-lb. watercolor paper. (I ran out of my Fluid paper. The Strathmore is okay, though a little rougher in texture.)
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