Imitation and flattery

[NOTE: This was written on 5/22, but I am only publishing it now because of the original portrait being a birthday gift.]

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.

Comic Relief

I decided to quit angsting over stuff I'm not enjoying, and have a funday today. My Facebook friend Heidi posted a photo of herself getting her hair color renewed, and I decided it was the perfect combination of realistic and wonky for today's portrait. On the one hand, it's pretty funny, and on the other, it expresses the sheer delight of all women everywhere who have gone without hair color and cuts for the past 18 months and are now making up for it with a whole lotta aluminum foil!

I drew this in pen without benefit of pencil plotting, so her nose is a tad short and a little bulbous, and her gums a bit bigger than they should be, but basically I think I caught her likeness, as well as the predominant emotion of the photo. I hope she doesn't mind being my inadvertent model!

"Heidi Weave"—Uniball pen, Daler Rowney inks, silver Signo gel pen, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches. (The silver is shinier in person.)

Loose

I have a really hard time painting loosely. The unfinished stroke, the color allowed to bleed in whatever direction it likes, the touch of a brush that doesn't specifically delineate anything—these are things that for the most part escape me. I'd like to be a looser, more expressive painter, but there's something in me that just can't resist "fixing" things instead of letting them be.

I have also never mastered the art of wet-in-wet painting—it's an exacting process whereby you become intimately familiar with exactly how wet or on-its-way-to-dry a particular passage has to be in order to successfully add to it without wrecking it.

So when I say that I'm pretty pleased with this painting, please take all those things into account. I realize, looking at it, that it's overworked, and not terribly spontaneous-looking—but the areas of white left alone to glint, the mix of dark and light greens and browns and grays in back that allow the major colors to pop—all these make me happy, despite the areas where I can see I should have stopped five strokes sooner to preserve the effect I wanted.

I will keep practicing this. It's something that I have occasionally been able to incorporate into a portrait, but I lack that spontaneity there as well. Perhaps one effort will feed the other.

"30x21_Mary'sDahlias"—PJ watercolors in Bee mixed media sketchbook.

Water, Sky

Today for 30xDirect, I tried one with both sky and water in it. I had the page tilted too much while I was working on it, so my transitions from blue to yellow to peach in the sky didn't stay separate, they all bled together and got muddy and quit looking like part of a sky. I was fairly happy with the "land" part of the painting, but the water was almost as problematic as the sky. And once again, my sketchbook paper didn't prove up to the task. I painted little reflections in the water of the buildings along the shore, and they mostly dissolved and had to be gone over, to their detriment.

I should either quit doing these excessively wet things on paper that won't hold up, or switch to stuff that I'm better at anyway, such as portraits and still life, that will work in my sketchbook. I'm loath to switch to "good" paper for these, since they are mostly just exercises, plus I like having the entire month contained in one sketchbook...but I also wanted to try some things that would challenge me this year, which the sketchbook doesn't like, so...bother.

Anyway...

30x21_WashingtonSunset—PJ watercolors in Bee mixed media sketchbook, about 7.5x10.

Day 7

One thing I have discovered this week is that I have absolutely no clue how to paint water so that it looks like water. I look at the reference photo, I see the colors, I see the darks and lights, I try to mimic them...and it looks like a bunch of (badly) blended colors on a piece of paper, not like flowing water. In this case I don't think it's a matter of practice makes perfect: I think I'm going to have to find someone to teach me how to paint water, if I continue to want to do that.

I don't do a lot of landscape, never have been great at it. There are several reasons for that: lack of depth perception, a skewed sense of angles and perspective...I'm one of those people who knows intellectually that the table has four equal legs, and that knowledge makes it hard for me to paint what I'm seeing in front of me, which is probably two legs more or less the same length, maybe a third that's half as long, and a missing fourth. I look at the angle of a roof of a building, and I have to physically lay the pencil down on it to see if it is slanting from down to up or from up to down, because if I just look at it and guess, I will get it wrong, guaranteed.

Give me organic shapes, and I can follow outlines (although I'm also not great with foliage). I don't know why I can't do that with artificial structures, but so far, no dice.

Anyway, all of that was to say, today's drawing has bad angles, water that is not believable, and a tree that looks like something a kid would paint. But...I gave it a shot. (It would also have helped if this were on real watercolor paper—the sketchbook just wouldn't stand up to the multiple layers needed for the water, and it wouldn't let me leave the white sparkles that might have made the water more convincing.)

"30x21_Canal"—PJ watercolors in Bee mixed media sketchbook.

Selfie

I haven't done a selfie for far too long, and I was feeling like being a little quirky tonight, so I decided to take it out on myself!

Is it wrong to be a little kind to one's double chin in instances such as these? or to make one's eyebrows a little more defined than they have become in older age? I did include my white skunk streak and "sideburns," I should get credit for that.

"MEwithBun"—Uniball pen, Daler Rowney inks, glue, clear gesso, tissue paper collage,  on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.