Let's Face It lesson...kinda

This week's Let's Face It 2024 lesson was with the adorable Misty Segura-Bowers. She did it in oil, but those of us who prefer acrylic were encouraged to use that. I picked a fairly limited palette, though not as limited as Misty's, and followed basic procedure, but ended up changing the final product a bit. I used my own reference photo instead of hers, and rather than making it 12x12, mine is 12x16, because I wanted the opportunity to isolate the space around the head from the space around the body so I could have some fun with it.

I have painted from this specific reference before, in my Deb Weiers-inspired phase back two years ago right after I took her class, but that was a whole different kind of fun from this one!

Misty used Cadmium red as her base and then did a thin overlayer of raw umber, but I had just bought an enticing color called Red Oxide, which came out a few shades darker, so I painted my background with that. (I also don't like using Cadmium colors, even though they say the level is so low in paint that it's not toxic. Why risk it?)

Misty used a grid and sketched in the figure upside down with raw umber, filling in sections as she went; I don't really like working with a grid (it's a pain to remove it when you're done using it), so I did a rough outline trace using white pan pastel, and then free-handed the rest.

This was a challenging portrait in many ways. Painting a darker complexion on top of a very dark background meant it was hard for me to see the contrasts, so I kept getting things either too light or too dark and having to color-correct. In doing so, I lost some of the spontaneity of my earlier marks. The best part of the portrait may be her shirt, because I painted that quickly and using broad strokes, without fussing too much with blending or defining.

Her bald head was also difficult, because part of the darker shadows on the back-side of her head are actually a faint fuzz of hair growing in; but I didn't want to get itsy with that, so I made it smooth. I had a few false starts, too, with how light the lightest lights should be against the rest, and using what color; I started out with more of a Naples yellow, but it didn't look right, so I switched over to Titan Mars Pale, mixed with a little burnt umber. The darkest darks in this thing were supposed to be raw umber, but I discovered I was out (how did I let myself run out of that essential color?!), so I mixed the burnt umber with some Cobalt violet and a teensy bit of Payne's gray and made do. All of this was made more subjective because the reference photo is in black and white! (Misty's was, too, and I thought I should play by that rule on mine, even though it was a different model.)

The gold halo is a Liquitex metallic medium. I really wanted to add this, but I'm not sure whether I thus ruined the painting. I did like the simplicity of it before, but I had this idea of giving it an iconographic feel, so I went for it. Parenthetically, someday I would like to try gold leaf instead. I used gold leaf way "back in the day" (i.e., in the misty past of my 20s) when I did illumination and rubrication on calligraphy manuscripts, but I have only ever used it in tiny bits (on ornamental capitals and borders) and on paper; doing large areas on a board will, I think, be another challenge. I aspire to doing something more interesting than this flat circle—more along the lines of the awesome Stephanie Rew!

Anyway, here she is. I named her Saint Side-eye. Golden acrylics and metallic medium on thin birch board, 12x16 inches.