Surf the World

I haven't felt much like painting lately, but this week's Let's Face It 2022 lesson was with one of my favorites, Emma Petitt, and it looked like a fun one, so I jumped in. Mine didn't turn out anything like hers; I went much more realistic with my figure, but I did create a gorgeously rich substrate that was a big part of the exercise and what made this special.

The substrate was created by brayering on three different colors (in layers, allowing them to dry in between), and then going over them with stencils. The object was to create one of Emma's "beach babes," this one specifically a surf babe (finished example by Emma at right), so I found a stencil that felt like waves to me and used it liberally with beautiful Amsterdam Turquoise-Green paint.

  

This was really fun to create, and I was pretty happy with it. Emma and I share a love of color, and my favorite combination is orange, purple, and turquoise. There's some Payne's Grey in there, too, to give a nice dark contrast.

The next task, which I didn't photograph because you couldn't really see it, was to grid my selected reference photo (thanks to @dinoopis for that, and also to Heike Kurtenbach for bringing her to my attention) onto the canvas and do the drawing. I started at 5 a.m., did it once, got the grid too big and ran out of room for her feet, so I erased it and did it over, finishing at about 8:30. Took a break for breakfast, and then started painting.

Emma's babes are much more stylized and exaggerated, and while I did go into this meaning to do the assignment (with my own model) more or less the way she did, I ended up painting a much more realistic interpretation of the figure (although I did use her painting methods), and was so reluctant to cover my pretty background that I ended up leaving most of it as is. I darkened part of the background, and went over the rest of it with some turquoise cut with white to knock back the intensity of the pattern and put water-like swishes and swashes over the top. The colors are slightly lighter than what shows in the photo, but I couldn't get it any closer than this in Photoshop.

I was trying for the idea that she's about to stand up on a surfboard that is partially covered by water, but because her feet and hands are painted over the top of the water, it turned out looking more like she's standing in the middle of a puddle (an ocean?) on the rounded horizon of the earth! But I'm okay with that.

"Surf the World"—acrylic paints and stencils on 16x20-inch canvas.