Back to acrylics

I have wanted to paint for a few days now but haven't had any extra energy (or the will to sit still for so long) after running various errands and keeping some appointments. But yesterday I found a black-and-white photo online of Carson McCullers (the photo is by American photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe),  having a relaxing moment with her cigarette, and the pose appealed to me as something I could have fun with, particularly in a horizontal format. So I covered a piece of paper with a heavy layer of swirled-on gesso for texture, and this afternoon I jumped in.

She turned out a little less painterly than I had intended; I had the dickens of a time getting all the angles of the arms/shirt right, and almost lost the significant hand out of the top of the frame, but after sketching, painting over the charcoal and doing it again a couple of times, I finally got pretty close. The hand combination is vastly overworked, but also fairly accurate after a few tries. Now that I'm looking at it again, that bottom wrist needs to come up a bit, and her ear is at a weird angle. And her nose is too long. Sheesh. Maybe some adjustments are in order...

Note: I went back in later in the evening and shortened her nose, fixed the angle of her ear, and adjusted the bottom wrist. One advantage of working in acrylic! I think it's better...and it looks more like the model, too—she actually has that long space between nose and upper lip!

I did have fun remembering to carry all colors into all areas of the painting, so that there is a little of the background green in her face, while the blue of her eyes carried through to the shadows on her shirt. I added the purple shadows last, because once I was done, the face didn't look sufficiently world-weary in comparison with the one pictured in the reference photo!

"CarsonSmokes"—white gesso, charcoal, acrylic paints, navy Stabilo pencil,

on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress paper, 16x12 inches.