Petitt Special

This week's lesson was with my beloved friend and mentor Emma Petitt, a three-quarter-length figure with hands, using stylized patterning. Emma always makes it look and sound so easy—"Just give a little sweep of your brush here," "Splodge it on, make it chunky, don't focus on likeness or perfection," and so on, spit-spot-done. Yeah, right, Emma. This thing took me more than seven hours, and it's not even close to what I wanted it to be, but...it was good practice for me to try some different techniques, whether successful or not in this particular painting, so I'm calling it finished.

Emma is famous for her huge feet, outsize legs, and spidery long fingers (in her paintings, not on her own body! Ha!). I didn't go quite as far as I should have with the fingers, with the result that instead of looking purposefully elongated and distorted, they just look kinda wrong. She also almost never paints features on her women, preferring to leave the face a blank so that people focus on the other fanciful parts of their physique and clothing, but I find blank faces a little creepy sometimes, so I added one on mine. (Also, I liked the looks of the reference model and wanted to duplicate some of her characteristics.)

The spontaneity of this, adding in the lemons and leaves wherever they felt necessary while changing the style of dress and substituting headgear, was a useful exercise for me, as was painting around things to put in both the background and the ground color of the dress. I know that I tend to be way too literal with duplicating every bit of the reference photo when I paint, so departing radically from that was good, even if I was following Emma's lead and not doing it strictly on my own.

I did substitute lemons for oranges in mine, mostly because my lemons are all ripe and falling off the tree in my back yard right now, which kept them in the forefront of my brain, but also because I ran out of orange paint while doing the underpainting (a combination of orange and violet) but still had several shades of yellow and gold in my palette.

I also didn't use the same proportions, as I didn't have a canvas as large or as long and narrow as the one Emma used. But I still managed to capture most of the figure.

Here is the reference photo, just for purposes of comparison, since seeing it showcases how Emma starts with an idea but then radically departs from the inspiration photo.

This is "Lemon Dressing"—pencil and acrylics on a thin birch board, 12x16 inches.  Note that this is cropped a little due to the size of my scanner bed—there's a little more blue space at the top above the arm, and more of the cut-off lemons on either side as well.