Fixit ticket

Sometimes a painting keeps nagging you long after you have "decided" that it's finished. It can be anything—as small as one necessary highlight that somehow didn't get added, to a major restructuring of a face or a figure—but every time you pass it sitting there on your desk, it cries out to you, "I'm not right and you know it!" (This is yet another good reason for being a tidy person who puts her paintings away in a file drawer!)

I felt like painting today, but didn't have any big inspiration or even a general subject in mind; cue the nagging. The image of my Facebook friend, artist Flo Lee, was sitting right there staring accusingly at me, demanding I pay attention. So I went back into my reference photos and pulled up onto my computer screen the photo (screenshot) from which I had painted the picture, and then opened and put up the digital (scanned) image of the painting right next to it, and it became glaringly obvious what needed to happen.

Her nose in the painting was a little too long (which I wasn't going to fix, that would be a row of dominos resulting in a brand new painting), but the appearance of length was greatly exacerbated by the fact that I had painted the bridge, the tip, and the nostrils (i.e., almost the whole nose) way too narrowly compared to the one sitting on Flo's face. Likewise,  although she does have a small mouth, it's not nearly as tiny and pursed-up as the one I painted for her, and looked more relaxed in the photo; and there was something about the teeth....

So, I squeezed out onto my palette the half-dozen colors I would need to do repairs, turned on some '70s rock, and went about fixing Miss Flo Lee. I realized, while I was at it, that I had also given one eye too exotic a slant in my attempt to mimic her eyeliner, so I fixed that while I was at it.

Most people will probably look at this and say "Didn't we see this same painting a couple of weeks ago?" and not notice any material change. But I noticed, and if it hadn't happened I would know, so now it has. It's still not perfect (her nose is also a little crooked), but at least she's not shouting at me any more!