Experiments

 Yesterday I had my back tooth pulled and the hole plugged, under anesthesia, and although it was a short procedure and I wasn't as zonked as I was the time I had a more major dental surgery while knocked out (seven filling replacements and a crown!), I didn't expect to feel good today. Surprisingly, despite a broken night's sleep and the obvious after-effects of the dental work (soreness, slight headache), I woke up feeling energetic (which is rare, even without dentistry!). I decided I would take that energy and put it to good use doing some long-neglected chores—between finishing out my class at UCLA and my tooth trauma, I haven't been doing much.

Then there was a conjunction of events: 1. I received an order from Dick Blick with some new artist materials; 2. I received some stencils I had sent for and completely forgotten about until they arrived; and 3. I went on Facebook.

I had a message there from a long-distance friend saying she wanted to buy one of my paintings, which was a thrill, so we completed the transaction and then chatted for an hour about various and sundry. I then scrolled through my feed a bit and saw this comment posted by another long-distance friend, Jeffrey Scot:

"This morning I watered my plants, prepared a nice cup of tea, read some lovely poetry, and wondered when my inner child had turned into a little old British lady."

I joked with him that he would only have to worry when he donned a pillbox hat to do his reading, and wham! inspiration struck. So much for dishes, clothes sorting, and paperwork. I had a portrait to paint!

This is the first time I have used either stencils or rubber stamps in one of my portraits, and I discovered that although you can use watercolors or inks with stencils, they're not so great on rubber stamps (they bead up). I usually use Tombow markers to color my stamps, but was afraid to do that here because they are water soluble, and if I decided at any point that I wanted to do another wash over the top of things, they would run. So I worked hard to get the watercolors to work with the stamps, and ended up with some mushy, indefinite images. I'll have to figure this out and try again. I ended up using a Tombow for the lettering, because it had to be readable, and made sure not to get any water on it.

One of the advantages of living alone (as long as you have no guests, which is a foregone conclusion during the pandemic) is that you can live in squalor a few days (or weeks or months) longer with no one the wiser (unless you tell them, duh) and do your painting instead.

Pencil, stencils, rubber stamps, watercolor, Daler Rowney ink, India ink, Micron pen, collage, white gel pen, on Fluid 9x12-inch 140-lb. watercolor paper.

Oh, and in case anyone wondered, that's Sonnet 14 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning on his shirt, in my seldom-used and rusty cursive!