02 January 2024

LFI 2024, Day One!

Starting a new year of portraits, with Kara Bullock Art School and the class Let's Face It 2024. This is year #3 for me with this class, and although I was MIA for about two-thirds of it this past year, it's still worth it to get 50 lessons for the year and be able to go back to them whenever I want.

Today's lesson was with Kara herself. I love the loose, painterly quality of her work, but have never been able to loosen up my hand and eye to quite that degree. But I'm going to call today's painting a win anyway, for several reasons. First of all, I did an underpainting and then did my sketch using a large paintbrush, instead of drawing out every last detail with a pencil, which is huge for me. And then I continued using one brush for almost the entire painting, although it wasn't quite as large as the one Kara used. My painting is much more blended than hers, and although I used most of her palette, I introduced a few colors to which I am partial (like Cobalt Violet and Titan Mars), and switched out her black for Payne's Gray, because I don't like the harshness of black. I also confess that I broke out a smaller brush to clean up a few edges, but not much!

Here's my sketch and underpainting in burnt umber fluid acrylic:



The model photo didn't have a name attached, so I'm going to call her "Tanya"—acrylics on 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.





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