I'm in the peculiar position today of trying to paint a portrait in the same manner as a previous one that I painted, and not remembering how I did it! Even with the first one sitting on my scanner facing me, I'm having a hard time reproducing the steps that brought it out of the paper and made it pop. I don't remember what I did with inks and what I did with watercolor, so I had to try a little of everything to get it to work.
This is as close to a commission as I have gotten so far, so I wanted it to be good. I asked yet another artist on the Deb Weiers FB page if she would be willing to trade art with me—I saw a specific piece of hers that I wanted—and when she said yes, I told her to look through my (extensive!) collection of portraits to see if there was something she would like to have or, if not, I could paint her something. She came back and said, "I like this one! It's my favorite colors and even kind of looks like me." But it turned out she didn't want that particular portrait (which is good, because it belongs to its subject now!) but rather for me to do one of her in the same manner. So I said yes.
It's difficult, to begin with, because it's on gray-tone paper, which means you have to work twice as hard to bring up any kind of realistic skin color over the top of it. My choice wouldn't have been the gray-tone—I used that on the other portrait for a specific reason, which was to lend an extra bump to the gray-white hair color of the subject—but this subject has platinum blonde hair, still white but with a hint of yellow and light brown, which also stands out nicely on the graytone but ended up overpowering everything else—it's a little too iridescent! I did eventually get there, but there are probably five layers of paint in five different colors on those cheeks.
On the other portrait, I didn't use an outline except for the eye makeup, but in this portrait, the individual's teeth are showing, and needed some definition—not a lot, but I had to reproduce her specific smile. But using an outline didn't conform with the other portrait, which was cited as the example of the kind of thing this person wanted, so...what to do? I ended up just bumping up the color of the gums and the dark mouth behind it, and put in a teensy bit of gray to define individual teeth, then wiped it off so most of it disappeared.
In all the reference photos, she was wearing a red dress. She did say that the other portrait was in her favorite colors, which included a sort of purple-red background, but since she always dressed in bright red, I compromised and made this background more of a berry red color with less purple in it, and used the line of the background to define her shoulder line, and the necklace to give a lower border. That necklace was kind of fun—it was glittery, so I used my silver gel pen to make it sparkle a little.
I did end up putting a black outline around the background, simply because no matter what I did, I couldn't get the paint lines quite straight, which looked messy. This looks (I hope) like the wobbliness was on purpose!
"Siân"—pencil, Daler Rowney inks, Paul Jackson watercolors, white and silver gel pens, on Strathmore Toned Gray Mixed Media paper, 184-lb. (smooth), 9x12 inches.
I hope she likes it! It's shipping off to Spain as I write.
No comments:
Post a Comment