My favorite model

I was excited when I checked out the lesson for yesterday, the 21st, and discovered that the reference photo was of my favorite model, Jenell Del Cid. I was not so excited by the time I had redrawn her not one but three times, going so far as to superimpose my drawing over the top of the reference photo to try to figure out where I was going wrong.

I'm quite pleased with the delicacy of the painting and some of the effects; I liked Lee Grest's soft approach and the way she worked from dark to light and then went back in to strengthen certain areas of the portrait. But what stymied me, weirdly, was the likeness. It was a challenging pose, looking up and over her shoulder as she is, and that's the only way I can account for not being able to get it to look that much like Jenell. The other portraits of her I have done have been face on, or nearly so, and came out very like her, in my opinion, but I'm not sure one of her friends or followers would see this and say "Oh, look, it's Jenell!" It's a portrait of a pretty woman, but the likeness isn't exact.

"Sy2123_Jenell", pencil and watercolor on Strathmore 140-lb. coldpress, 9x12 inches.

Here are some of the others I have painted of Jenell, just for comparison:

 

12, 16, and 17

As you can tell, I'm not keeping up very well with the daily paintings, but I did a few more this past week so I thought I'd post them.

This first, Shannon, was under the tutelage of Ellie Kerr-Smiley, and I wasn't particularly satisfied with it. It had some challenges: First of all, the angle of the face (I'm terrible with profiles), and second, the flowers, which I haven't the patience to master.

Next we have Amelia, painting with Elena Mahoney Sánchez, who was a crazy exercise in extreme uplighting (not to mention some interesting makeup choices that I haven't seen since the '70s), and then Tom, also painted with Elena using an interesting red and green color palette.

Amelia made me kinda crazy but turned out to be weirdly wonderful, while Tom was a great exercise in using alternate colors to reality and also leaving parts of the painting untouched in order to spotlight other parts.

I'm definitely learning some stuff doing this, even if it's not been a daily process.