Sort of a portrait...

I decided today to make a contribution to my "people reading" collection, because I haven't done one in a while. And although I'm not unhappy with this, I certainly can't claim it as a win in terms of painting a portrait or capturing a likeness.

I have to confess, I don't know how to paint children so they come out looking like children! The photo model for this picture was a Facebook friend's daughter, sitting and reading on her couch. She looks like she could be somewhere between 10 and 13 years old, but this gal looks like she's at least 18, or maybe even in her 20s! And yet, the pose, the face, the hair, are all essentially as they were in the photo.

I have to talk to people I know who paint children (Colleen?) and find out the secret!

Portrait of a reader, #3: Robin.

And so on...

The next person up was Kim's mom. (Kim is the second portrait I did, and she asked if I would also paint a portrait of her mother. Kim is my awesome Facebook friend from back east who, shortly after "meeting" me, found out that I wanted a pink pussy hat for the first Women's March, and promptly knitted one and mailed it to me; so painting a picture for her was the least I could do!) Kim liked it, but elected not to show her mom, because Judy is sensitive about her age and I didn't spare her wrinkles.

Heeeere's Judy! Cute and lively, if also a little weathered.

My next portrait was of my friend Hubert. I wasn't planning to paint Hubert—this whole thing wasn't really about friendship or including or excluding certain people, it was more about finding interesting faces and/or unusual angles on photographs (whether among my friends or not—I have a whole bunch of photos of interesting strangers saved up too!) to play with. But I had breakfast with Hubert on Sunday, and he was so down about work, and also so admiring of what I had done so far with the portraits, that I decided I would include him.

I struggled with his more than most, and didn't quite get the likeness; something about the shape of his head, and the angle of it just didn't work. It still has a feel of him, but that's more from the slight twinkle in his eye and his neatly pressed plaid shirt than anything else. But he was happy to be in the gallery!

Then I did the person I've been wanting to do for days, although I ended up using a different reference photo than I had planned. I went looking through photos I had saved and found this brilliant one of my Michigan Facebook friend and co-namee, Melissa Squires. She has such a beautiful, elegant, interesting face that she's a pleasure to paint, and I loved this quirky photo as well.

I think this is my favorite one so far, but maybe I'll do another without the cigar at some point!

Today was my UCLA day, which starts at 5:30 when I get up (in order to beat rush hour traffic over the Sepulveda pass) and ends after I teach my 3.5-hour class, spend an extra hour consulting with such students as stay after to talk about final projects, and drive home to a long-awaited lunch around 3:00. Today, as I do on many of these post-teaching afternoons, I then took a two-hour nap, got up and putzed around for a while, and watched TV. 

I was going to skip today completely, but I got bored with what I was watching and turned it off; and in looking through my photos I saw the next I wanted to attempt. So I thought, Oh, I'll draw it tonight and then paint it in the morning. Yeah, right. At almost 1:00 a.m., I finished, scanned, and here it is: Susan (Brooks) Sabo, my longtime friend from back in Advocate days, also now living in Michigan. This is from a photo taken by my previous subject, Melissa Squires.

Susan is a hard one to capture; adding the paint to the drawing made the whole thing look a lot more accurate, but it still falls far short of the best likeness. Her face is way too long and narrow here, and I couldn't find the right color yellow for her almost white-blonde hair. But the one thing I was pretty happy with was the capture of her square jaw and "butt chin," which I love. I hope she forgives me for the rest!

Since I only have time for three more portraits before I start my June challenge, I'm going to follow my own whim and paint who I like. If you have a request in with me, it may have to wait until June is over, or until a day when I feel like making two paintings instead of just one. Sorry, folks, but if I don't keep it interesting for me, then it's no longer fun!

More portraits...

Well, this thing has snowballed. First, Rani (subject of my last portrait) said "Do Anarda next!" So I found a photo of her from two years ago, when we went to hear the Master Chorale sing Christmas carols at the Disney Center as our winter treat, and made a portrait of her.

Then my former boss and now co-retired librarian/consultant/friend Barbara said, "Now we are all going to want one," so I said to her (unwisely, in the clear, in Facebook comments) "Send me a photo and I'll give it a shot." Five minutes later I had a selfie in my Messenger queue, so today was Barbara's day.

Several people have taken that offer to Barbara as a wholesale invitation to everyone to send photos, so I now have a few inadvertent so-called "commissions" lined up, and I also have a couple of friends and other interesting faces I really want to do. I may end up with a month of these! We'll see if I get bored and move on.

I'm supposed to be doing 30x30 Direct Watercolor starting June 1, and these won't work for that (no drawing first, only painting straight to paper for that challenge), so maybe I'll set a cut-off of May 31st for my own personal portrait challenge. At one a day, that's seven more...probably plenty!

Doing some portraits

I don't often draw portraits, but I had the idea to do one of Kirsti for her birthday (to post on her FB page), and had so much fun with it (even though it was a little wonky) that I decided to keep going.

Next I did my friend Kim, from a weird upside-down selfie she took, which turned out really fun...

And today I was chatting on Messenger with my buddy, Rani, who lives in CHINA now, and I missed his face so I decided to draw it. That facial hair is CHALLENGING.

I wanted to put him in a box like the other two, but I started too big and ran out of room. Boy, that Shadow Violet paint from Daniel Smith does NOT want to "follow the bead" to give a smooth background, at least not on sketchbook paper!

Maybe I'll keep going...who knows, tomorrow it could be YOU.

Uniball pen, watercolor (various) on BEE multi-media sketchbook paper.

Logo/identity, Draw with Me

I have wanted for some time now to change the picture on my Book Adept blog to one that is reading a book. I have just completed the drawing/painting for it, but I'm not so sure it's exactly right. I got my cousin Kirsten to take some photos of me to use as reference, and I happened to be wearing a pin-striped shirt, so when I painted this, I put in the stripes. But since I am lazy and also exacting and didn't want the pinstripes to become either a long, tedious project or messy because too thin, I made the stripes wider, and now the picture looks a little like I am a convict, albeit a turquoise-garbed one! I may end up doing this over again and changing the shirt to a plain turquoise T-shirt. For now, I am putting it up on the blog to see how it wears. Eventually I plan to have it on my business card, but we will see first whether or not this is the final.

I also did a little painting yesterday: Danny Gregory has a weekly thing on Thursdays now on the Sketchbook Skool Facebook page, called "draw with me," where he goes live for half an hour and you draw along with him whatever he happens to choose for the week. This week it was the sight outside your window. Since Danny lives in Greenwich Village, his view is just a bit more engaging than mine, in suburban Los Angeles! But I still paid heed to the assignment and did a fairly creditable picture of my back patio and part of the yard.

The color of my patio is much more a "Tuscan" yellow and less this brilliant lemony shade, but otherwise a fairly good likeness. I particularly enjoyed attempting to make the view catty-corner through the patio appear that it was partially obscured (as it is) by screening.

Incidentals

Here are a few more people-doing-their-thing sketches, captured early morning at UCLA on Tuesday, and at a celebratory Mother's Day lunch at the Lazy Dog restaurant, today.

This isn't my family; they were all late! So I spent my time drawing the booth

across from me while waiting for my party to arrive.

Uniball pen, watercolor, in Moleskine sketchbook.

Also, a card that I made for my cousin Carol Sue; although this isn't the same one that I gave her. I had to paint it twice, because on this one (on the inside, not pictured) I spelled "MOTHER" without the letter E! Whoops.

Happy Mothr's Day! 😊

Inspiration

You never know from whence inspiration will come. I met up for breakfast on Sunday with the wonderful artist Colleen Reynolds, who was driving through from San Diego to Carson City, Nevada, where she lives, and impulsively suggested we rendezvous. I had never previously encountered Colleen in person, but we had enough of a basis for friendship on Facebook to make an in-person meeting a delightful continuation, rather than an introduction. It was a great 3+ hours!

One of the things I wanted to ask her, since she is a prolific, professional, award-winning artist with great painterly skills, is how I could start making a transition back to "real" painting from what I do now, which feels more like sketching. I'm contour drawing with a Uniball and then watercoloring, and I love that technique; but it feels a lot more like illustration than fine art, and lately I've been homesick for the days when I was in the art program at Valley College, making an 18x24-inch painting every single week instead of drawing breakfasting UCLA students in my teensy Moleskine.

To my surprise, Colleen said that she admired the fact that I draw "from life," that many fine artists don't have those drawing skills and resort to tracing their under-drawing before making their paintings, and that she thinks I should keep it up! I was immensely flattered by that; but, I told her, I still want to go bigger and bolder. She suggested that I either do just that with the contour, or try doing the contour using pencil rather than pen and then painting it, and seeing how that works out.

So, this week I resolved to start some painting exercises, at the very least. This has been another issue: When you get used to doing only urban sketching, it's easy (on all the days when you stay at home indoors like I do) to get out of the habit of regular drawing and/or painting. Tuesdays are usually a wash (pardon the pun), since I get up at the crack of dawn to drive to UCLA before traffic gets bad, and then exhaust myself with a 2.5-hour lecture and a one-hour book discussion, followed by office hours for my Young Adult Literature class. The inevitable end to Tuesday is late lunch when I finally arrive home around 3:00, usually followed by a nap!

But, today is another day. I had an ambitious plan to take on one of my reference photos I've been saving up to do some more paintings of people reading, and to make it into a "real" (i.e., large and on watercolor paper instead of in a sketchbook) painting; but first, I procrastinated by going on Facebook and poking around to see what people were up to, and a photograph popped out at me from my friend Rae's feed that I just couldn't resist trying to replicate!

Rae is a hiker, and takes some beautiful shots of the city from unexpected vantage points; here, captured in pencil and watercolor (in my 9x9 Bee multimedia sketchbook) is a birds'-eye view of the Griffith Park Observatory in the foreground, backed up by a panorama of the city and topped off with some beautiful cloud patterns. I hope Rae doesn't object to my appropriating her photo as inspiration; I got so excited when I saw it that I didn't stop to ask! I moved in a bit on the subjects and left out about a third of her photograph, but still managed to let some of the yellow flowers she shot through in the extreme foreground poke up their heads. I'm pretty pleased with this first effort going down a new track!