She Can Fly!

One of my goals this coming year is to expand from simple shoulders-up portraits with an occasional hand in the picture to partial- or full-figure paintings. Of course, the plan included the idea that by now I would have cleared out my studio to make room for an easel on which I could paint much larger pieces, because doing full-figure means you either work smaller on the same size canvas, or keep working at the size you like, and expand to a bigger background. But...my studio is NOT cleared out, and I don't have room for my easel, so I decided I'd get a jump-start on the year by trying one at my typical size, which is 12x16 inches. And not to be timid about it, the reference I chose has not one but three people in it. They're children, but still...three! And they're not tiny children, they're probably 11 or 12 years old, so, yeah.

I found the photo online of a whole group of girls watching an older girl do something that was, to them, amazing, and someone caught them all with their mouths open and expressions of shock or surprise on their faces. The person doing the demonstration wasn't in the picture, so one could only speculate, but the girls are dressed like either dance pupils or gymnasts, and the photo was labeled "She Can Fly!" I cropped out all but three of the girls, picking the ones with different stances, heights, hairstyles, and body types to get as much variation as possible. (Here on the right is the rest of the photo that was cropped out.)

I chose to paint them as ballet students, so I tried to give the vague background the feel of a dance studio without getting too picky. I also gave them all the quintessential pale pink tights and black leotards worn by little ballet girls everywhere. This immediately became a challenge, because in the photo the girls are bare-legged, and some of their outfits are not one-piece black leotards but two-piece shorts-and-tank combos. Oh, and just to up the challenge, the reference photo was in black and white, so there was a lot to extrapolate.

I first made the mistake of painting their legs just as they appeared, but that made them look bare-legged, so I went back and glazed over all the shading with another couple of thin coats of Titan Mars Pale (sort of a skin-tone pink made by Golden) to get the legs to look like they were covered in fabric. The problem is, all the girls are also caucasian, so their actual skin tones would likewise be pinkish. I tried to give a bit of nuance, both by adding some Naples Yellow to the mix and by going strong with the shadows in Cobalt Violet and accentuating their reddened cheeks. I also decided to give a little variation to them by only painting one of the three as blonde (even though all three had light hair), making the middle one a "ginger" and the one on the right a brunette. I felt like since they were identically dressed and had extremely similar coloration, that was the only way to distinguish them.

Although I discovered with my last painting that I prefer working on thin birch board (with the bit of texture it provides) rather than on slick, ultra-smooth artist's panel, I might have done better to use the latter on this painting since the smaller you work, the harder it is to paint the details, and that bit of wood grain meant some imprecision. And since the reference photo was also quite blurry, getting things right became even more of a challenge—particularly those open mouths. It was hard to tell from the fuzzy photo whether there was actually tongue showing or not, and I repainted both the stretched lips and the interior of the mouths several times over on each of the girls.

My final challenges were environmental: The hydrolics in my desk chair are beginning to give up the ghost, and keep dropping to a level at which my knees are actively uncomfortable after just a short period of sitting; but I couldn't paint for long in one day anyway, because of the low winter light. I only have one working artificial light source in my studio at the moment (all the plugs are behind big furniture and thus hard to rearrange), and the afternoon light coming through the window has been significantly diminished both by the time change and by the season. Basically, I only have good light from about 1:00 to about 3:30, and that's if it's sunny outside rather than overcast. So this painting has taken me an inordinate amount of time to finish, because every time I'd get going, the light would go away.

Basically, rather than call this "She Can Fly," I should have titled it "Exercise in Frustration." But I'll stick with the more positive message.

Pencil, gesso, and acrylics on thin birch board, 12x16 inches.