Back to pretty

I didn't really plan to paint today (the state of neglect around here is becoming ever more dire), but I saw this woman's photo on UnSplash and she kinda demanded my attention. And if I was going to paint today, I was going to continue my campaign of the unconventional from yesterday; but somehow that didn't happen.

She looks just a little old-fashioned because, while her hair was merely a short wavy cut, in my portrait it looks more like she had it marcelled. I like this color combination (violet, orange, and turquoise) and it seemed to suit her red hair as a background. I got a little carried away with her shirt, but oh well.

One more painting and I'm going to have to go back to watercolors for a few days; I'm almost out of white paint. I have an order in to Dick Blick.

"Poppy"—charcoal, acrylic paints, Stabilo marking pencil, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.

On my own

There's always that moment, after you take a class and you practice what the teacher has to share, doing the assignments as instructed, that you have to make the decision: Do I want to keep this method? Does it work for me, with my style? Can I adapt it so that it's not just a copy of what my instructor was modeling? Can I somehow make it my own?

I guess this is that moment for me and the "Emma Petitt method." I am still using the abstract layered background, and painting a girl over the top, but this one feels more like me. I had a couple of objectives: I wanted to include hands and a torso, to practice painting more than just a face and shoulders; and I was tired of painting pretty, pouty, glamorous girls—I wanted to paint someone expressing some emotion, and use an appropriate color scheme in the background to complement that feeling.

I found a photo and changed a lot of things about it—the hair, the clothing, a little bit of the expression, the coloring—but I kept the upraised defensive hands and the "shout." I don't think she looks frightened, exactly—more surprised, shocked, and fending off something, whether physical or emotional. And the color scheme of orange, red, and black, softened by the blush color, works with the "temperature" of the piece. I really wanted to add in some blue, but instead settled for moving some of the yellow-green color from her eyes around the rest of the picture. It keeps the theme more strident.

I had some trouble with the anatomy, because the photo reference had long hair covering the neck and shoulders, so I wasn't able to see their precise position. I shifted both shoulders a couple of times, and I think they are close to where they should be, given the foreshortening on the one side. In the photo, the foreshortened side hand is much closer to the viewer than is the other one, and I didn't manage that—the hand should have been bigger. I'm too close to the work right now to see if it looks deformed because of relative proximity, I'll take another look later.

The teeth were an interesting challenge, and were repainted several times. I'm still not sure I couldn't do better, but I do know that outlining them was not the right solution! Ha!

Over all, I'm satisfied with my first experiment branching out from the past few weeks' practice. More to come!

"Back Off"—charcoal, acrylics, Stabilo All black pencil, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 12x16 inches.

Adjustments

I went to Emma's FB page and asked the pro for feedback and, some subtle brushwork later, I think Olivia is much improved. I lightened up her left, intensified her right, and put a glaze of a slightly darker blue behind her shadow side to set it off, then carried a diagonal of it across to the other side above her head. I freshened up the orange bits of hair drifting out from her head to up the contrast, dragged some orange back into the blue background to make it feel like maybe it is still original substrate, and I think I'm done!

Suddenly she pops, and it's not just her face popping out of a uniformly pale (if interesting) background—now you can register her neck and shoulders as being a part of a whole figure, which is partly what was missing before, that sense of connection of head to body.

I'm so much happier with this, all for a tiny smidgen of paint and 15 minutes of consideration and slight alteration. A great lesson—thank you, #EmmaPetitt!

"Olivia, Take Two"

The bonus round

Yesterday's painting was technically the last lesson in Emma's class, but then she pitched in a bonus one, and I loved both the color palette and the reference photo, so I jumped in. I made the background last night so that it would be dry by morning and ready to paint on.

I'm calling her Olivia because she looks like one to me; no name was vouchsafed by Emma. I'm a little ambivalent about the end product, because Emma always emphasizes that the reference photo is just the jumping off place and that we shouldn't worry about painting an accurate portrait (which is definitely how she used it), but this girl was so delicately pretty that I felt compelled to work on the likeness, with the result that I couldn't follow some of Emma's lesson because she went a different way. I also really wish I had started a little lower down on the page...she feels like she needs more hair...and more air! Maybe it would solve the problem to crop her more tightly so that the bottom of her hair exits at the bottom of the picture.

I keep looking at her and saying to myself, "Is she done?" She seems a little saccharine to me, or generic?...perhaps I should have followed Emma's lead after all. I have decided she is finished three times and each time gone back in with one more highlight or brush stroke or shadow or strand of hair. She doesn't quite feel complete, but...that is the point of these paintings, to leave the raw or messy elements to show through, in both the background and foreground. So I guess I'll leave her alone, unless somebody tells me there's something significant missing!

"Olivia"—acrylic paints, charcoal, Stabilo on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress paper, 12x16 inches. (I scanned her in two pieces, so there is a seam.)

Better as cropped?

Emma's final big assignment

This is supposed to be the penultimate assignment in Emma Petitt's class and, as such, was supposed to take place on canvas, not paper. One addition to the process was to make a mix of gesso, plaster of paris, and wood glue (ick, I know) and slather it all over our 16x20 canvas, to give extra texture upon which to paint our backgrounds. The grooves and swirls made by this mix, once dried, let the paint sit at all different levels and create additional interest.

I had two problems with this: Number one, I didn't really feel like making this mess in the middle of a hot July afternoon, even on a shaded patio; and number two, I didn't want to "waste" a canvas on painting this assignment, because I would feel like if it was on canvas I would need to hang it, and I don't want to hang something that appears recognizably in 400+ other people's homes as an accomplishment of a class we all took. Yes, I want to do the assignment, but I then want to go on and make the method my own, with a different model, different colors, and so on. So, I pulled out my 12x16 watercolor paper instead, gave it a nice thick coat of gesso (which I swished around thoroughly so as to make it more textured), and did the assignment on that. (You can't use the above gloppy mix on paper, it's too heavy and the paper won't support it.)

Doing the "swirlies" with the gesso really gave the piece some extra underlying texture, I have to say. And I also liked Emma's color base this time, with the addition of the Prussian Blue and then the Naples Yellow to just brighten things up slightly. I didn't have Prussian, so I used Blue-Green, which is similar but lighter.

Here is the finished base substrate, with the gesso and the five colors all applied in subsequent layers that dry in between.

The assignment was a little different this time, for two reasons: One was that we were including hands, arms, and some torso in this one; and the other was that there was no "live" model (i.e., a reference photo), we painted this as a straight duplicate from Emma's artwork. So this piece probably looks more like the original than any of my others, since I was directly copying the teacher's work instead of doing my interpretation of a reference model she had selected—another reason I'm glad I didn't do it on canvas!

The hands were challenging, and some of my fingers came out looking like someone both double-jointed and spatulate. I think that when I have to copy actual, real fingers from a photo, I may do better—we'll see. But the procedure was quite similar to previous efforts, and I enjoyed deciding what to hide completely, what to drop back with a thin layer of over-painting, and what to leave strictly alone. This is a fun style, and I plan to continue it with subjects of my own.

"Last Girl"—gesso, acrylic paints, charcoal pencil, Stabilo All, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 12x16 inches. (This didn't photograph well; I had to scan it in two parts and stick them together, so this has a bit of a seam between the two...)