Week 20

This week's assignment was with Christa Forrest. The objective of the lesson was to capture an unusual angle on a face, which is more difficult, as Christa points out, if you are accustomed to using the traditional method of mapping out a face, like this one, right.

Since I learned to draw portraits using the contour method, I don't find this exercise quite as challenging as someone who relies on proportional tools such as this. I still have to spend some time looking, angling, and sometimes erasing to get it right, but I feel like I have an advantage because I was not taught that way. That's not to say that I don't make mistakes, just that they may be different ones!

This portrait was supposed to be painted "straight" (i.e., natural colors) with a blue-sky-and-clouds background, but since I wasn't painting in acrylics, I decided it would be more fun to do a color study. So I painted the model in four shades of purple watercolor (with a little white gesso for highlights, because I can't find my Titanium white!), and used a bit of Payne's Grey and some Sunflower Yellow for tiny highlights here and there. For her hair, I did an undercoat of shades of brown, but decided it would come together better if I mixed my darkest purple with my Payne's Grey, so I went over all of it with that combo once the first layer dried.

I don't know if the white highlight curls in the hair are too many or too few. I just did a few and stopped when I thought I should. They're not quite as adept as Christa's.

Christa covered up all those beautiful collarbones with tissue collage to give her a blue shirt, but I wanted to try painting them, since getting the shading right is challenging. But I needed to "end" the painting at the bottom somehow, so I took purple's opposite (green) and used some gouache and ink to stencil a leafy frame for her shoulders. The leaves and the highlights in marigold inspired the background, which may be too bright for the subject, but oh well.

I did paint "straight" in one sense: I didn't do any outlining with my Uniball. So all the lines and shadows and highlights were created with paint only. I haven't done that for a while—it felt good!

Here are the reference photo and Christa's painting:

 

And here is my version.

"Breeze"—pencil, gesso, stencil, ink, Paul Jackson watercolors, gel pen,

on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress paper, about 9x11 inches.