Beauty

I often wonder, when I come across a reference photo of a truly beautiful woman, whether my subsequent painting of her is beautiful in and of itself, or if I owe everything to my subject, who would shine through regardless of how I chose to portray her.

This was a photo provided for the Friday exercise on Next JENeration Art, Jenny Manno's Facebook page, but I decided to paint her in the manner of LFI2021's Angela Kennedy, in her lesson from last Monday (look a few posts down and you can see the details of that one), in Payne's Grey with only select coloration and some linework to accentuate certain elements. I also wanted to try at least a partial background using stencils for interest.

I had planned to leave the stencil work in its original color, a pale peach, and the rest of the background white, but the stenciling looked a bit messy (I should have taped it down and used a proper stencil brush instead of rushing it), and the white behind the mostly monochromatic portrait didn't highlight it, so I went over the entire background with the Payne's Grey after I was all finished with the figure, and I like how it dropped back both the stencil and the solid background, without totally obliterating the pattern and color of the stencil.

I wasn't quite as successful as last time at keeping all my Payne's Grey blending smooth and soft—the ink dries so fast that it's fatal to let your attention wander to another area even for a few seconds, or to try to paint too large an area at once, so there are some hard edges here and there that I would have preferred to be soft (like her left cheek), but over all I was happy with the capture. Her hair also didn't blend quite as nicely as I would have liked (again, too slow to drop in the other colors), but I kind of like it looking more multicolored and strand-y.

This model was copiously covered in freckles, and I also originally planned to add those at the end, but I couldn't bear to risk ruining it by an injudicious flick of ink, so I turned chicken and left them off. I think she still translates as a pale Irish redhead, though.

She didn't come with a name, so I'm calling her Fionnuala (fin-oola), which in Gaelic means "white shoulder."

"Fionnuala"—stencil, acrylic paint, gesso, pencil, Daler Rowney inks, Uniball pen, Signo gel pen, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.