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.

Same reference, different medium

I was staring at my beloved Daler Rowney acrylic inks this morning and on impulse decided to do a second portrait of Cathleen, but this time drawn in ink and painted with transparent colors.

I did an undercoating of pink, and then threw some orange and some raw sienna into it and sprayed to mix. When that dried, I drew straight onto the page with ink, which used to be an incredibly risky thing to do; but I have become increasingly sure of myself when it comes to placing lines in a face, and I did pretty well on this one. The only flaw was that I tilted her mouth up too much on the right and down on the left, so that it's not sitting quite where it should below her nose. But I didn't take that class with Deb Weiers for nothing: I obfuscated that by going back into the portrait later and doubling up my lines everywhere, making them more loose and sketchy than the first time around, so that everything has a little illusion of movement, and the slant of the lips doesn't look as critical when there are multiple lines straightening them out a bit. Ha!

After the ink dried, I went back in with the pertinent colors—white for highlights, raw sienna and burnt umber for her hair, and for her skin a judicious mix of pink, orange, purple, and a tiny bit of payne's grey for shadow, and lastly a pop of turquoise for her eyes, echoing it again in the shirt, but with other colors showing through from the underwash.

I decided to leave the sunglasses off this time, because I know the limits of my abilities, and drawing them straight onto the paper in ink was bound to be a disaster. I could have penciled them in first, but I skipped them instead, just for a change.

I'm not sure but what I prefer this one, done in about an hour and a half, to the one I spent so many hours on, with pencil, acrylics, and Stabilo. We'll see what Cathleen has to say. Although she'll probably just end up with a twofer, and she can decide for herself which to frame and hang!

"CathleenTransparent," Uniball Vision pen and Daler Rowney inks on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.