Another portrait in Payne's Grey

I decided to try another monotone portrait in Payne's Grey on grey-toned paper tonight, again with a little bit of blush added. I used for my reference a picture I had saved from a friend's photography shoot, excerpting only the mother's head out of the family photo of she and her husband and two daughters. I particularly liked the angle of her head, and that she was looking down through almost-closed lids.

I didn't get the angle of the head quite extreme enough, and thus the eyes were also harder to get right—it should look as if she's looking down, but I'm not sure she doesn't just look like her eyes are closed. I considered putting some whites in there, but they really don't show at all in the photo, so...no.

I also tried a mixed media thing that didn't really come off. I used some Daler Rowney Shimmering Green ink as a background, and apart from tinting the grey card faintly darker and giving a slicker surface, you can't even tell it's there, which is disappointing; the shimmering gold ink pops on this surface and I thought the green would do the same.

I was pretty happy with the texture I achieved for her sweater, which was a tedious process.

Addendum to post: I woke up at 5:30 and decided to mess with her, so I put in a background coat of pearlescent white ink over the green. Then I took a stiffer watercolor brush (I had been working with my swishy Silver) and amped up some of the darks in eyes, brows, lips, and shadows, and reiterated some of the wispy hairs that had gotten blurred out by the white. I also tweaked the directionality of the eyes. I think it's an improvement...although it shows more in person than in this scan.

"Mother Love"—pencil, Payne's Grey watercolor, and Daler Rowney Pearlescent White ink on grey-toned smooth 184-lb. mixed media paper, 9x12 inches.

Acrylic inks

I haven't done any work with my acrylic inks for some time now—there was a period of about a year, not too long ago, when I used nothing else, but when I started painting with acrylics (opaque) I got out of the habit, and when I didn't use acrylics, I went back to watercolor to develop a looser style.

But this week's instructor at LFI2022, Christa Forrest, specified acrylic inks as the week's medium, and I was happy to return to them. Turns out, however, that the ones she uses appear to be a lot more like semi-opaque liquid acrylics than like the mostly transparent Daler Rowney inks I use. Her painting this week was also painted on a birch board with a watercolor ground, and I didn't have one of those, nor do I enjoy painting on top of that ground with inks, because they seem to sit on top and I prefer the permeability of paper with inks. So already I was planning in what ways I would need to diverge from her lesson: No birch board, transparent inks on paper, no Procreate grid to start me off; and also, I wasn't enamored of her model. It's not that it was a difficult angle (it was), or that she wasn't an attractive girl (she was), but that I just didn't care for a piece in which so much of the face was cut off—it was pretty much all cheek, neck, and ear, with the focus being on her wild head of hair.

So, I considered finding a different model but making use of the same colors, layout, and wild curly locks, and then realized that she was staring me in the face from Christa's Instagram page. An artist portrait is a bold segue, but I've done it before, so I decided to go for it.

I feel like there is something essential missing from her expression, although I have looked over every bit of it minutely and can't figure out what I missed. I had to redraw her eyes several times, as they are more wideset than they initially seem; and for once, I think that rather than making someone's eyes too large, an all-too-easy thing to do, I instead erred on the side of slightly too small. I also didn't quite get the angle of the face/head right, but since I lined the features up with the angle I did capture, that's all good.

I really enjoyed working with the inks again, particularly because I combined it with using my water-ful Silver Velvet brush to blend things more loosely than before. I also had big fun with the hair, to which I gave a purple undercoat and then combined Payne's Grey and white Daler Rowneys with final dark accents in black India ink. The shirt was supposed to be collage, but given how poorly that sometimes works on paper, I gave it a pass and left her in her simple purple shell top.

"Christa"—pencil and Daler Rowney inks on 140-lb. Fluid coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.