Artist portraits

Before I'm done with these classes, I'm going to have quite the collection of artists' likenesses—every time I don't care for the lesson, or don't have the materials I need to complete it, I contemplate struggling to do it anyway and then decide to paint the artist instead, particularly if they are photogenic and have a good reference photo handy on their Instagram page!

Today was no exception: While I had nothing but admiration (and awe) for how Phoebe did her own version of Svitlana Prokopenko's assignment for PYHAS 2022, reproducing with gels and pastes and thickeners and who knows what other media what Svitlana painted in oils because Phoebe doesn't do oils, I had zero ambition to emulate that effort. (I don't do oils either.) I had a pre-painted acrylic background lying around that I thought would be good as a backdrop for a portrait of Svitlana, since her primary colors are delicate whites, pinks, lavenders, and reds, so I drew and then painted an artist portrait instead.

I miscalculated by painting her sweater what turned out to be a rather bilious shade of green, but I'm too lazy to change it; maybe I'll go back and make it another color, but I thought that making it red would be too strong and the lavender would be overwhelming with all the other purple in the picture. I didn't want to do it in its true color, which was a rather unprepossessing beige, because combined with the hair it would be too light and too bland; thus the green. Oh well...

"Svitlana"—pencil and acrylic paints on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.