Back to Emma style!

Our lesson this week is with one of my favorites, Emma Petitt! It was a pretty large and complex lesson—she encouraged us to go big, and to paint on canvas if we had it, so I did both. I decided 18x24 was just too big for my subject, so I went 16x20, but that's still considerably bigger than I've been working lately. But since the lesson was two full figures, tiny heads to giant toes, we needed the space.

I struggled a little with the canvas, especially with making the background—because it's not absorbent in the same way that watercolor paper is, the background got a little heavier and more opaque than I prefer—certainly more so than Emma advocates. But, I moved along and tried to use it to my advantage.

I found two separate photos of young women slouching on sofas and put them together. I wanted to convey the idea of them on the sofa without actually painting the sofa, and I'm not sure it came off, they're kinda floaty.

I used China marker for the drawing, per Emma's new method (she used to use charcoal), but I didn't find (as she said) that it resisted movement; it did in fact smudge some black/gray into some of my paint and I had to let parts dry and then go over them again to obscure that, since this style demands a freshness of color unpolluted by grays. I also used a Stabilo to reinforce some lines at the end and then had to do more "fixes" when I smudged that as well. This was a lot of working and re-working that took away some of the spontaneity; and I had some trouble with the hands and feet, as expected. But—I did it, and I'm mostly pleased.

I called this "Footsie" because while they are sitting and not touching, there's a little frisson of anticipation in those feet! This is a bit darker than it looks in real life—indoor photography with inadequate lighting! Thank you, @emma_petitt_art, as usual, for a fun and thorough lesson.