Strong Light

You never know where messing about will take you. I prepared this background last night for an assignment given last week on Let's Face It 2021. After it dried, I tried several times to draw the figure that was supposed to appear on it—it was a head-to-toe picture of a pensive woman in a long dress. I kept getting the head too small and the figure too tall, and after erasing it in frustration a few times I concluded that the real problem was that I was not invested at all in painting that picture! So I erased the pencil as best I could, and then painted several more layers of color over where I had drawn, figuring I would use the background someday, for something-or-other. Never waste good paint and expensive watercolor paper!

I have had a reference photo I liked sitting on my desktop for a couple of weeks now, except that the subject was wearing a flat cap and had a pony tail, and I didn't like either of those features. Today, I was once again looking at the photo, and realized two things: 1. This background, while not what I originally had in mind for that photo at all, would actually work nicely if I chose my colors properly; and 2. I could just find a model with a similar hairline and paint the hair I wanted onto this model! So I did a search, found the hair, and set to work.

Unlike last night's abortive attempt, I was able to draw this all in one go, in charcoal, with only a couple of small erasures. Amazing what happens when you really want to do something...

For once, I remembered to take some process pictures, so I have the charcoal drawing on the background, the palette, and a couple of WIP photos. I particularly wanted the photo of the palette, so that I could remember what colors I put out and used for this, since it was a new experience for me, painting a woman with dark skin color in acrylic. I'm well able to paint, overlay, and blend in watercolor to get just the perfect tints, but I didn't know whether I could translate that into acrylic.

 

I am really pleased with this portrait. Sometimes you paint something and realize that you have crossed a barrier of some kind, and this one took me across a couple. The main one was letting go of the compulsive need to blend everything and allowing it to be "painterly." The other, lesser one was realizing that I now have sufficient skill to combine reference photos to get the model I want, instead of relying on someone else's photographs.

 

"Strong Light"—charcoal pencil, acrylic paints, Stabilo All brown pencil, on 140-lb. Fluid coldpress watercolor paper, 12x16 inches.

I owe a lot to Emma Petitt, including how to make an interesting background and allow show-through to make the portrait more interesting as well; and also for showing me how to start with highlights and keep coming back round to them, selectively darkening up some and leaving the rest to show. It's tricky, and I'm beginning to get the hang of it. Thank you, Emma.