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.

"Don't waste paint!"

If someone asked me, What is the one thing Emma Petitt emphasizes during her lessons? my answer would have to be "Don't waste paint!" She constantly reiterates: Don't clean that brush, go back over your highlights with it again, go over your darks, and when there's hardly any paint left on the brush, scrub it over the surface to get some nice ghosting effects over the color.

I have taken her exhortation to heart to such an extent that I have had a whole line of portraits emerge from the backgrounds that I make on watercolor paper with whatever leftover paint I have on my palette at the end of a portrait session. One portrait's colors become the next portrait's background, and no two are alike, depending on what colors and in what quantity I use.

Here is yet another one, serendipity that emerged from thrift! I rolled and scrubbed the colors into a piece of paper, and then scraped with a credit card and made marks into the surface with the hind end of a paintbrush. I left it to dry, and tonight I took a look at it only to see the ghost of this young woman's head and shoulders emerging from the background. The outline and colors were so perfect that I didn't even consider applying more paint; instead, I grabbed a couple of shades of brown Conté pencils and simply defined the outlines and added a few shadows to the appropriate areas. It took about 20 minutes, and there she was!

"GirlHead"—acrylics and Conté pencil on Fluid 140-lb watercolor paper, about 8.5x10.5 inches.

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.