LFI #34

 This week was an unexpected treat—Deb Weiers was our teacher, so I got to go back in time to the beginning of my portrait journey, when I signed up for Wonky Friends and Critters in August of 2019, the class that led me to branch out both abstractly and color-wise and start to find my own style(s).

Rather than do my own thing, I went cheerfully back to basics, making pencil and charcoal marks on the page, running an eraser through them, throwing on some water and Daler Rowney inks to make a background, then running the other end of a paintbrush through the wet paint to make more pattern.

Then we added some acrylic paint, took some off again with random water drops, swooshed it around with a credit card, and started the image making.

Deb loves collage, and saves old drawings, from which she makes prints and cuts out features to add in, so she started out gluing on a collage eye. I don't have a printer and didn't want to cut up an original (mostly because everything is painted on heavy watercolor paper and would stick up too much from the surface), so that's where we first diverged.

Then she showed us her so-called reference photo (I say "so-called" because her stuff never actually looks like the person, it's just taking-off point), and that sent me off on a different trajectory. I loved the slightly surprised, doe-eyed look of this guy (I think she got him from a photo gallery of convicts!) and decided that my piece would be a somewhat faithful portrait. I did collage his eyebrows with some fun striped tissue paper, and also collaged some commentary on his nose. I also skipped his tiny, thin-lipped mouth for Deb's scrubbed-on one (you drop some red acrylic and then swipe across it with a credit card to see what you get), but over all, I think I still caught a likeness. Do you think his mother would recognize him?

Deb always shades with India ink, but I never have gotten the hang of how to do it fast enough not to leave hard lines, so I subbed in some Daler Rowney Payne's Grey instead—I think it gives him a softer look.

Here he is:

"Sensitive"—Pencil, charcoal, Daler Rowney acrylic inks, white and black gesso, Uniball pen, white gel pen, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress paper, 9x12 inches.

What fun it was to return to this expressive style—thanks for the lesson, Deb!

By the way, here's Deb's result—she IS the mistress of fun and funky ornamentation!

© 2021 DEB WEIERS