Being "painterly"

I complimented someone recently on a painting they shared on Facebook and said "it's very painterly." They didn't know what I meant by that. The actual definition is "characterized by color, stroke, and texture rather than of line." What I was attempting to convey was that she had painted in a looser style, with actual strokes showing, which is something to which I have aspired. I tend to get super blendy and make sure there are no hard edges in my paintings, and while it's an acceptable method, it feels less spontaneous and expressive than I would sometimes like.

Last week's lesson in Let's Face It was by Simone Scholes (@simonescholesart), who has evolved her style to a more painterly one by taking her reference photo and pixelating or "posterizing' it, so that the separate areas of color and shadow are more clearly defined, and then painting from that instead of from the regular reference. It's an interesting approach, and does yield a much less specific yet more emotive image. I didn't have the app she was using and didn't want to download it, so I took my photo into Photoshop Elements instead and approximated what she had done (not quite as successfully).

I definitely didn't go to the extremes to which she goes—hers are almost like paint-by-numbers in a way (I don't mean that as an insult!), in that she has definite separate strokes of paint for color changes, with little blending between them. I can't quite make myself do that, but for me this paint is much more brushy and less tight than usual, so I appreciated the lesson and the idea behind it. Ironically, I think this painting took me longer to produce than a "regular" one would, because I was so focused on achieving that painterly look that I had to keep backing up and replacing things to go with that! But I did enjoy this, and will try another with a conscious focus on strokes rather than blends.

This was a fun one for me to attempt, because I just painted it a few weeks ago, with a line drawing in pen and a wild watercolor palette. Jenell Del Cid is a favorite model, and I didn't feel like I quite captured the amount of startlement in her eyes in the watercolor, so I got to try it again here. I'm pretty happy with it! (My scanner cut off the top 1/4 inch, but I couldn't be bothered to re-scan. There's a little more hair and border at the top than shows here.)

"Jenell What?!" — pencil and acrylics (and stencil)

on thin birch board, 12x12 inches.

Here's the previous version in watercolor (and acrylic inks):