Day 6

This is the model/lesson from Day 4, but since I'm doing it on the 6th, we'll call it that. I don't think I'm going to catch up with the previous couple, but will go onward and do as many as I can. I'm letting myself pick and choose, because some of the models and methods simply don't appeal. Maybe that's not kosher, but I don't care!

I liked this one because it was a young boy, and children are notoriously harder to paint than are adults, since their faces are still in different proportion. I can't explain exactly what I mean by that, but if you have tried it, you will know.

Dritan Duro is another loose painter, somewhat wet in wet, which is not my usual style, but I feel like my rendering of his lesson was fairly successful—at least more so than my last blurry effort! I liked the challenge of keeping the light on the side of the face and the hair—I had to forcibly make myself stop instead of painting it in. It looks a fair bit like the child, though from a little more extreme angle than the photo, somehow. A good exercise.

"Sy623_Jess"—pencil and watercolor, on 140-lb. Fluid coldpress, approx. 8x11.5 inches.

Day 2

These Sktchy artists seem to be dedicated to keeping things, well, sketchy, or at least the watercolor equivalent. It's called loose, as regards both strokes and adherence to actual vs. interesting colors. Which is fine with me for a while, although I tend to enjoy working a little tighter than this.

This guy was a challenge from a couple of standpoints: His brows and parts of his beard were a very pale ginger color, that red hair color that's almost yellow but with a pinkish cast, and I didn't manage to save the eyebrows from being a bit sludgy or the beard from being darker in some spots than it should have been. I did have fun with the deep shadows around his eyes and under his nose, and I did enjoy introducing a lot of counter-intuitive colors to his complexion, but he got kinda smudgy towards the end. Overwork!

This is "Castor," aka SY23_Castor in my files. Pencil and watercolor on 140-lb. fluid coldpress, about 8x10 inches.

30 Faces/30 Days and a birthday

I have been painting so infrequently lately (because of all my extenuating health issues) that I scarcely remember what I'm doing with a paintbrush in my hand! But things are beginning to be resolved (stone gone, stent out, AFib under control with pills, legs decreasing in girth a bit with new Beltwells), so I ambitiously decided to sign up for Sktchy's 30 Faces/30 Days challenge in watercolor. And of course messed it up from Day One! I didn't look at which year I was on, and ended up doing Day 23 from 2021 instead of Day 1 from 2023. Oh, well, I enjoyed it, which is the main point. I'll get back on track tomorrow.

It's a looser, wet-in-wet kind of painting that I don't often employ, mostly because I'm kind of a control freak, but I do like it when it turns out well. This one's not bad, but I've done better. I'll have to work on this technique some more. I tend to go too far and over-work it, and that's the death knell to the spontaneous look.

SY123_Leeza: pencil and watercolor on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress paper, about 8x12 inches.

Yesterday I did something in a style more typical to me: Kara Bullock had a birthday, and I decided to do a birthday portrait based on a cute photo she had taken of herself in her studio. This is Uniball pen, in Deb Weiers's double-line style, painted in watercolor, about 8.5x10 inches.

I purposely made space next to her face so I could add birthday greetings in type in Photoshop Express when I was finished.

Hopefully there will be 30 more faces to follow—we'll see how it goes!