I met my friend Cathleen on Zoom for lunch last week, and was showing her some of my recent portraits. Cathleen is a pretty low-key person (she was head of the children's department at the library for many years, which means cultivating zen-like calm in the face of daily chaos), so I was quite surprised when she sent me a picture the next day and said "Can I commission you to paint a portrait of me from this photo? My mom always loved this." I said, Sure! and proceeded to overwhelm her with samples of all my different styles, from "straight" to "wonky," and watercolor, inks, acrylics? She simply said, I will leave the style up to you, but don't paint that busy blouse I'm wearing! I was grateful for that (it
was busy, a paisley in multiple colors!), but I loved the pastels featured in the blouse, so I decided, since they suited her coloring as well, to use the blouse colors as the basis for the entire portrait.
She was also posed in front of bookshelves, so I asked if she wanted those in the background, but she said no, do something more generic. But, since she is a librarian, I couldn't get the books out of my head, so I did a little trick that I hoped would suggest the faint outlines of bookshelf-like structure: I taped down some narrow sections with 3/4-inch white artist's tape, rolled on the background with a brayer in four of the colors featured in the blouse I wasn't planning to paint, then took off the tape and rolled over those white areas again, so they showed, but faintly. Deciding to do this sent me in the direction of painting this portrait in acrylic, since I'd have to do something different with a completely transparent background in watercolor.
At this point I departed from the Emma-inspired process used for the underpainting, because I didn't want charcoal showing through on this, so I drew the image in pencil, then roughed in the lightest lights and graduated around the face to the darkest darks. I initially got her eyes a little too big and her nose way too narrow and had to repaint both; I made her hair too wide, and had to cover some up; and her chin was too pointy and had to round out a bit. But once I got those details squared away, I was able, I think, to get a pretty good likeness, and I outlined selectively, afterwards, with a brown Stabilo All pencil.
I picked up the pale blue of her eyes with a plain turquoise shirt, leaving some of the background to show through to give it a nice fadeout quality towards the bottom, and used the lavender from the background, mixed with a little raw sienna, for the shadows. Her peachy complexion is Titan Mars Pale (Golden paints) combined with a little Naples Yellow, some Amsterdam raw sienna, orange, and carmine...I mixed and overpainted a LOT.
The eyeglasses were the final project, with much attention given to where the highlights were landing on the glass.
"Cathleen"—acrylics, pencil, Stabilo All, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 12x16 inches. Sold!
This portrait, beginning to end, probably took me about seven hours! I think that's the longest I've ever worked on one, which directly reflects my nerves over getting it right. I sent Cathleen a photo, and her response was, "I love it! Pack it up, it's done." So I guess I did good!
