Pucker up

Laurie's final painting

That featured puckered-up mouth is just about the only thing my new painting turned out to have in common with the week-before-last LFI 24 lesson #45 with Laurie Johnson Lepkowska. I wanted to find my own reference photo, because I don't enjoy doing the exact same image as everyone else, so I did a search for girls and women with puckered lips and found this beauty below in a red beret with matching red lips.

I say it has little in common with Laurie's painting because she works in an incredibly organic way, drawing her person loosely with paint and a thin-tipped brush, then roughing in the features with broad brushstrokes and coming back after with just enough detail to capture the likeness. My process is much more painstaking and therefore less painterly and more blendy. I do aspire to what she does, but I'm too nervous or uncertain to go for it, most of the time. I may try this lesson again with yet another model, because I really liked her result and enjoyed how she went about the process. I also want to try out the simple Zorn palette she uses, instead of being so precious about my colors.

This was a challenge on several levels, the first one being the panel itself. I have become used to working on thin birch board, which has a certain roughness and texture to it. I was eager to try out a smoother surface to see if I would get better detail, but instead became somewhat frustrated at the outset while trying to get an even background—the brushstrokes tend to show much more on this slick surface, and coverage is more difficult. I decided to combat that by putting lighter streaks over the top of the flat background color. I liked it before I painted the portrait on it, but ultimately decided (with advice from Phoebe) that it was too busy, so I got rid of the streaks and went with a solid.

That pursed mouth has to include all the little wrinkles and indents made by cheek muscles to achieve that position without looking like a cinched-up purse, so there was that. And the scarf, which was similar (though not identical) to the reference photo, was also a lot of work. I didn't have a tiny enough brush to achieve the smallest dot pattern and ended up doing those areas with a white Signo gel pen, and I'm hoping that when I go to varnish, it doesn't all disappear! Likewise, the angles of fabric, stitching, and shadows on the criss-cross shirt were fiddly in all black. Finally, her hair, while being legitimately a mix of all those colors, came out kinda piebald instead of blending together like real hair. But I am happy with the portrait overall, and especially like the eyes.

"French Kiss"—pencil, acrylic, and gel pen on 12x16 artist's panel.