Angela again

 I painted Angela Davis's portrait once before, but that was when I was still striving for realism, so I decided to paint her again in my new style. I wanted it to be a sort of companion piece to James Baldwin, but not in the same colors I used for him, so I studied photos of her and decided on a color combination of yellow, orange, and purple. It wasn't that she ever dressed in those bright colors—quite the contrary, she seems to favor grays and greens—but that I saw something bright in her face that asked for them.

I went farther than I had planned with the hair treatment, and I really wish I had stopped where my first impulse said to, where it was more indicated and less specific. Her eyes are larger than in life, but that goes along with the new methods; I'm hoping that in this case it didn't render her less recognizable. Anyway, I guess the quote will take care of that, even if the likeness isn't perfect.

Daler Rowney inks, pencil, white gesso, Uniball Vision, white gel pen, on 140-lb. Fluid watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.

Back to basics

 I wanted to paint something tonight, but I wasn't led in any particular direction. Lots of people on my class site have been doing Inktober, which I avoid because I don't like just drawing in ink, I want to do full paintings, mostly, and also I never "feel" the prompts they offer. But I have to admit that I've been liking some of the more spare ink drawings I've been seeing, so tonight I decided to do a combination of pattern, spatter, and random line and let it all dictate a face for me. (I also didn't want to stay up until 2:00 a.m.!)

This is sort of going back to basics with what Deb Weiers teaches, with a combination of random background and blind contour drawing. I didn't do this one blind, but I did let the location of the lines and circles dictate the face. I also started drawing the connectors with my Uniball, but it was just too "civilized" next to the random stuff, so I drew the rest by dipping the wooden end of my brush in the ink and scrawling/scribbling with it. I had fun!

The red stuff at the top was an experiment that didn't work out very well. I had a piece of packing material that was a sort of diamond-patterned styrofoam-like webbing, and I thought it would be brilliant for texture to tape it down and paint through the holes; but because it's thick and bouncy, the ink connected with the material but not with the paper and didn't give a nice clean pattern. So I threw in some circles and shapes and outlined them to accentuate the red a little more.

Her name is Sukie, and her attention span is, shall we say, fluid at the moment...

Daler Rowney inks, India ink, gel pen, on Fluid 140-lb. watercolor paper, approx. 9x12 inches.