My Muse

I have been waiting for my birch boards to arrive from Dick Blick so that I could do this assignment of Julie Lee's from last week (referenced in the last post) on a more permanent surface, but I got an email today saying they were back-ordered. I didn't want to do it on canvas—I haven't gotten used to how acrylic acts on canvas, I have only painted two pictures on that surface and didn't like the level of detail I was not able to achieve; so I decided to go ahead and do this on watercolor paper, and I will just have to frame it if I want to hang it. Which I think I do; I'm pretty pleased with it.

Here are some process paintings: the background, and the sketch, in charcoal:

    

Julie paints opposite to Emma, in that she puts the shadows in first and then moves to the lights, whereas with Emma we start with the lightest lights and then go darker, so it took a little adjustment to get used to that, and I had to rework some stuff several times. I'm usually pretty fast with the portraits, but this one took me almost five hours. Of course, the one thing Julie left out of the lesson was how to know when to call it a day; so about 45 minutes of that was finicky tweaks!

I feel like I caught the likeness pretty well, although the head tilt isn't quite right and the forehead might be a tad tall; but these are minor details. The glasses were an interesting challenge, since this pair has color on the tops but fades to clear on the bottoms, but they also cast a shadow on my face. It may have been a mistake to use green and turquoise as the shadows, in colors so close to those on the glasses themselves; I don't want the shadows to read as part of the glasses. I don't think they do...?

I learned a lot from Julie's generous and wonderfully detailed lesson. Among the things: Vine charcoal works well as an underdrawing, if you then set it with some water so it doesn't mix with the paints. Use some red in the darks instead of making them flat black. Don't worry too much about the actual color of things, it will all read right in the end. And be spontaneous with your brush strokes. (I'm less adept at that last one.)

Here is "Me, My Muse." Acrylics, vine charcoal, and a little Liquitex gold acrylic medium (this shows up better in person), on 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 12x16 inches (less a border, so actually 11x15).