Stripes, hands, underpainting

The first lesson of the year from Let's Face It 2023 is chock full of stuff to learn. First of all, I'm working big—an 18x24-inch canvas—because the subject matter just seemed to call for it (and Kara Bullock's example is even larger). Second, we're doing Kara's signature method, which is to do an underpainting in Burnt Umber Light, and then paint over it with just black and white paint, letting some of the burnt umber show through. Third, we're doing stripes, and hands, neither of which is so easy.

I chose not to do the reference photo Kara used (her charming and photogenic cousin), not because I don't like her as a model but because I want to end up with something different than a copy that looks like everyone else's piece. I found a girl I really liked, but instead of a striped shirt she was wearing a strapless dress, and instead of having her hands up around her face or in her hair, they were below the margin of the photo. Undaunted, I then went online, found a girl with her arms crossed, wearing a boat-neck raglan-sleeved striped shirt (I just had to pick the hardest one to duplicate), posed at more or less the same angle as my model, and grafted the shirt and the one arm that would naturally appear within the proportions of this picture onto my own reference photo. I think it works okay, although the body feels a little small in comparison to the head!

There are lots of steps to this project—first we gessoed the canvas to give it some texture, and then we put a thinned-out coat of the Burnt Umber Light all over the canvas, leaving white showing through here and there. After that came the drawing of the subject (I used a grid of white charcoal), which I made using a Sanguine conté pencil so it would match with the undercoat.

Next came the underpainting of the subject herself in the burnt umber, using it to specify the darks and shadows of the portrait; there are some issues here that I will deal with in the final painting (the nose is not quite right, nor is the top of the head/hair, and I could hardly see the hand), but this gives a kind of map to follow with the darks and lights.

After the underpainting was done, I departed a bit from Kara's instruction method. She had us using the "Fluid" version of acrylics, which come in a bottle and are more like poster paint, while I generally use what's known as heavy-body acrylics, the thick ones from the tubes. I had always wanted to try the fluid acrylics, but discovered that, contrary to expectation, I didn't like them at all. I thought it would be more like working with watercolors, but instead I just felt out of control with them, and didn't like either the consistency or the level of opacity. So I switched back to my tube acrylics and went on to paint the picture using my own techniques.

Because my model was in a warm light in which her shadows looked similar to the burnt umber, I kept some of that in the picture to model the face, rather than going straight black and white. I'm such a color junkie that it's hard for me not to revert to color—any color—when I work. I actually meant to retain more, and I also intended for this picture to be much more "painterly" than it turned out to be—she is more smooth and blended than I had planned. But I am generally fairly happy with this, given what a struggle it was for me to paint in values rather than in colors.

"Stripes"—Conté pencil and acrylics on canvas, 18x24 inches.