LFI assignment...

As usual, that's a "sort of." The painting was supposed to be done in oils, but I don't use that medium. So I decided to do a watercolor. The assignment was someone looking down and slightly to the side, so, in other words, a more difficult pose. The teacher did a self portrait, but I had been watching a charming movie (Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing and Charm School) on Prime, and was fascinated with the facial expressions of the actor Robert Carlyle. (You might know him better from The Full Monty, way back when.) So I switched from watching it on my TV to viewing it online so I could take a series of screenshots of him in various attitudes, and I managed to capture this one of him looking down in approximately the attitude we were supposed to capture for our assignment.

This is vastly overworked, and the colors are more intense than perhaps they should be in some areas, but I really tried to capture the shapes of the shadows and highlights rather than focusing specifically on the face itself. I don't know that I caught it, but I gave it my best shot.

"Frank" (the character's name)—pencil and watercolor on 140-lb. Fluid coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.