Color

I thought I would have a new project to post a lot sooner, but I have spent the past three days trying to mix the proper green for the background of this one, getting closer with each mix but taking three coats of paint to finally find it. It's still not perfect, but it's the closest I'm going to get. Greens are tough! and not even the professionals agree on particular shades. I looked up "spruce," which is the color most accurate to what I wanted, and the variations started at olive and shifted through the green and blue tones to kelly and sage. This is blue spruce, and may be a shade on the teal side of that, but I am finally pleased with it.

I think the reason why I am so fixated on this ground-as-element style of painting that I learned from Flo Lee is that my obsession is and has always been color. I have friends who make gorgeous paintings with white gesso, black charcoal, and maybe a bit of colored pencil and, while I admire them intensely and often say Oh! I wish I had done that! somehow I never manage to stick with even the intention of experimenting with that style, if it has to compete with a full-color rendering.

This one was more complex than some of the "ground" paintings, because the background is a dark, intense color so anything superimposed on it was a big shift in value, and I had to be careful not to either under- or overdo the painting. My tendency is usually the latter (I don't know when to quit), so I sternly admonished myself not to be too fussy before I even started. Yeah, right.

You almost have to use a grid on these paintings, because they are on birch board, which is a lot rougher and more textured, even under a coat of gesso and three of paint, than is a canvas or a piece of paper and, since you're drawing with charcoal, it's hard to rub out when it gets down into the grooves, should you make a mistake. I discovered that gridding with white charcoal is a lot easier to "lose" afterwards; I have erased as much of it as possible, but you can still see some faint white lines. But they are not nearly as intrusive as is black.

I considered skipping one of Flo Lee's steps on this one: She goes in after she has made the charcoal drawing and smudges the parts she wants to show up as dark, using some hairspray (or spray fix) to wet the charcoal and make it spreadable; but there are so many large dark areas in this particular painting that I thought I would just do all of them with paint instead of messing with the charcoal. Although I have made six of these paintings so far, only on two of them did I feel like the charcoal step was effective, and in both cases it was because the subjects had short, choppy hair in a dark hue that showed up nicely against the background. But I went back and looked at some of the others and ultimately decided that there's nothing that looks quite the same as the dark of the charcoal, so I went ahead and smudged a few areas—which I also revisited with paint.

This painting was so challenging. It was too easy to underestimate the effects of a light color on that extremely dark background, and I did a lot of scrubbing off with a finger or a paper towel before getting the mixes just right. I somehow made the eyes too large, but managed to reduce them a bit when I saw my mistake. The glasses went in almost last; I had to complete everything under them before laying them over the top.

The pattern on the dress is a new stencil that saved the day. The reference photo model had on a dark green dress with flowers in shades of peach, rose, and turquoise, and I initially intended to try to duplicate it, but the colors and pattern proved too intrusive, fighting for attention with the face and hand, so I decided to go for this simple brocade look by using a stencil and different shades of darker and lighter green/turquoise.

I thought about lightening up the background behind her, but I liked the emergence of the hand from that dark background too much to mess with it further. I hope the idea that she is leaning against a wall is conveyed by the shadow and the angle of her body!

"Brunette with Specs"—charcoal and acrylic on 1/8th-inch birch board, 12x16 inches.