On my own

There's always that moment, after you take a class and you practice what the teacher has to share, doing the assignments as instructed, that you have to make the decision: Do I want to keep this method? Does it work for me, with my style? Can I adapt it so that it's not just a copy of what my instructor was modeling? Can I somehow make it my own?

I guess this is that moment for me and the "Emma Petitt method." I am still using the abstract layered background, and painting a girl over the top, but this one feels more like me. I had a couple of objectives: I wanted to include hands and a torso, to practice painting more than just a face and shoulders; and I was tired of painting pretty, pouty, glamorous girls—I wanted to paint someone expressing some emotion, and use an appropriate color scheme in the background to complement that feeling.

I found a photo and changed a lot of things about it—the hair, the clothing, a little bit of the expression, the coloring—but I kept the upraised defensive hands and the "shout." I don't think she looks frightened, exactly—more surprised, shocked, and fending off something, whether physical or emotional. And the color scheme of orange, red, and black, softened by the blush color, works with the "temperature" of the piece. I really wanted to add in some blue, but instead settled for moving some of the yellow-green color from her eyes around the rest of the picture. It keeps the theme more strident.

I had some trouble with the anatomy, because the photo reference had long hair covering the neck and shoulders, so I wasn't able to see their precise position. I shifted both shoulders a couple of times, and I think they are close to where they should be, given the foreshortening on the one side. In the photo, the foreshortened side hand is much closer to the viewer than is the other one, and I didn't manage that—the hand should have been bigger. I'm too close to the work right now to see if it looks deformed because of relative proximity, I'll take another look later.

The teeth were an interesting challenge, and were repainted several times. I'm still not sure I couldn't do better, but I do know that outlining them was not the right solution! Ha!

Over all, I'm satisfied with my first experiment branching out from the past few weeks' practice. More to come!

"Back Off"—charcoal, acrylics, Stabilo All black pencil, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 12x16 inches.

Adjustments

I went to Emma's FB page and asked the pro for feedback and, some subtle brushwork later, I think Olivia is much improved. I lightened up her left, intensified her right, and put a glaze of a slightly darker blue behind her shadow side to set it off, then carried a diagonal of it across to the other side above her head. I freshened up the orange bits of hair drifting out from her head to up the contrast, dragged some orange back into the blue background to make it feel like maybe it is still original substrate, and I think I'm done!

Suddenly she pops, and it's not just her face popping out of a uniformly pale (if interesting) background—now you can register her neck and shoulders as being a part of a whole figure, which is partly what was missing before, that sense of connection of head to body.

I'm so much happier with this, all for a tiny smidgen of paint and 15 minutes of consideration and slight alteration. A great lesson—thank you, #EmmaPetitt!

"Olivia, Take Two"

The bonus round

Yesterday's painting was technically the last lesson in Emma's class, but then she pitched in a bonus one, and I loved both the color palette and the reference photo, so I jumped in. I made the background last night so that it would be dry by morning and ready to paint on.

I'm calling her Olivia because she looks like one to me; no name was vouchsafed by Emma. I'm a little ambivalent about the end product, because Emma always emphasizes that the reference photo is just the jumping off place and that we shouldn't worry about painting an accurate portrait (which is definitely how she used it), but this girl was so delicately pretty that I felt compelled to work on the likeness, with the result that I couldn't follow some of Emma's lesson because she went a different way. I also really wish I had started a little lower down on the page...she feels like she needs more hair...and more air! Maybe it would solve the problem to crop her more tightly so that the bottom of her hair exits at the bottom of the picture.

I keep looking at her and saying to myself, "Is she done?" She seems a little saccharine to me, or generic?...perhaps I should have followed Emma's lead after all. I have decided she is finished three times and each time gone back in with one more highlight or brush stroke or shadow or strand of hair. She doesn't quite feel complete, but...that is the point of these paintings, to leave the raw or messy elements to show through, in both the background and foreground. So I guess I'll leave her alone, unless somebody tells me there's something significant missing!

"Olivia"—acrylic paints, charcoal, Stabilo on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress paper, 12x16 inches. (I scanned her in two pieces, so there is a seam.)

Better as cropped?

Emma's final big assignment

This is supposed to be the penultimate assignment in Emma Petitt's class and, as such, was supposed to take place on canvas, not paper. One addition to the process was to make a mix of gesso, plaster of paris, and wood glue (ick, I know) and slather it all over our 16x20 canvas, to give extra texture upon which to paint our backgrounds. The grooves and swirls made by this mix, once dried, let the paint sit at all different levels and create additional interest.

I had two problems with this: Number one, I didn't really feel like making this mess in the middle of a hot July afternoon, even on a shaded patio; and number two, I didn't want to "waste" a canvas on painting this assignment, because I would feel like if it was on canvas I would need to hang it, and I don't want to hang something that appears recognizably in 400+ other people's homes as an accomplishment of a class we all took. Yes, I want to do the assignment, but I then want to go on and make the method my own, with a different model, different colors, and so on. So, I pulled out my 12x16 watercolor paper instead, gave it a nice thick coat of gesso (which I swished around thoroughly so as to make it more textured), and did the assignment on that. (You can't use the above gloppy mix on paper, it's too heavy and the paper won't support it.)

Doing the "swirlies" with the gesso really gave the piece some extra underlying texture, I have to say. And I also liked Emma's color base this time, with the addition of the Prussian Blue and then the Naples Yellow to just brighten things up slightly. I didn't have Prussian, so I used Blue-Green, which is similar but lighter.

Here is the finished base substrate, with the gesso and the five colors all applied in subsequent layers that dry in between.

The assignment was a little different this time, for two reasons: One was that we were including hands, arms, and some torso in this one; and the other was that there was no "live" model (i.e., a reference photo), we painted this as a straight duplicate from Emma's artwork. So this piece probably looks more like the original than any of my others, since I was directly copying the teacher's work instead of doing my interpretation of a reference model she had selected—another reason I'm glad I didn't do it on canvas!

The hands were challenging, and some of my fingers came out looking like someone both double-jointed and spatulate. I think that when I have to copy actual, real fingers from a photo, I may do better—we'll see. But the procedure was quite similar to previous efforts, and I enjoyed deciding what to hide completely, what to drop back with a thin layer of over-painting, and what to leave strictly alone. This is a fun style, and I plan to continue it with subjects of my own.

"Last Girl"—gesso, acrylic paints, charcoal pencil, Stabilo All, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 12x16 inches. (This didn't photograph well; I had to scan it in two parts and stick them together, so this has a bit of a seam between the two...)

The Annes

Well, I did it: One more Anne. And I went ahead and did Anne Frank. I had this idea to do a written background to evoke her journals, cover it with transparent ink, and then paint a mostly opaque acrylic portrait over the top of part of that. It's combining all the best features from all the classes I have taken in the past year, and it may evolve into a new style for me—we'll see. I wanted to do at least one acrylic portrait to include with my submissions for this auction happening next Wednesday. I like the limited palette—it's just three colors and white, except for her lips.

She looks a little older here than in some of her photos—I modeled her face a little too much and gave her a more pronounced chin—but I think there is a likeness. And if no one else sees it, perhaps the writing in faux German will bring the point home! I like the way it is still peeking through on the light side of her face.

"Anne Frank"—pencil, acrylic inks, acrylic paints, and Stabilo All pencil, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches (including border).

Art for auction

About a month and a half ago, I signed up to participate in an online art auction. At the time I was turning out a painting a day, and didn't see any problem with coming up with five new pieces to sell! Then July and hot weather hit, and output fell off. I got a notice today that my bio and photo were due today and all my pieces—named, described, and priced—are due by Friday night. Eeek!

It's okay if I sell already finished work in the auction, as long as it isn't anything that I did as an assignment or "in the style of" another—it all has to be original work. But with the 70+ portraits I've painted over the past year and a half, finding five of my own shouldn't be any problem. Still, I wanted to create at least a couple new pieces; most of my portraits have been sitting unsold on Etsy (and Redbubble) and honestly, it's shaken my confidence a little that I haven't made any sales.

I did that painting with collage of Anne Boleyn the other day and was happy enough with it that I decided it would be one that I would sell; and that led me down the path of thinking of a theme, like how about people named Anne? Hm. The first to come to mind was Anne Frank, but I didn't know if anyone would want to buy a portrait of a girl with such a tragic end. Of course, Anne Boleyn, skinny neck, sharp sword...okay. But I kept thinking, and yesterday inspiration struck. I was finishing up my four portraits in acrylic for Emma's class, so I waited until today, and put in a hard afternoon's work. And I have to say, I've impressed myself a bit. I just hope someone else has the same sentimental attachment to this Anne that I do...

"Anne of Green Gables"—pencil, watercolor, ink, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress paper, 14x12 inches.

#4 of four

Our goal with this one was to leave as much of the background exposed as possible, and to be minimal with the rest. I had some trouble with that, because part of Emma's was predicated on its being painted over the least busy and lightest of her four backgrounds, while mine had a lot of darkness through the middle and bottom. So the face is much more "worked" than was desirable. 

She didn't want us to do the long straight hair of the model, but my background coincidentally had almost the exact divisions and lines that followed the track of her hair, so I went ahead and did it. I'm happy with the bit of serendipity that made my background look almost landscape-like behind her head—a vaguely Russian Mona Lisa! (because of her fantastic long, almond-shaped eyes and cheekbones).

As with the last one, we considered what was left on our palette when making our final plans, and used that on our brayer to "back off" parts of the picture. I had the blue from the previous portrait, so I mixed it with some of the white and rolled it down her left side, and then filled in a white portion above her opposite shoulder with red to complete the illusion of a backing landscape.

I probably could have messed with this for another half hour (and no doubt made it worse), but I touched up the features one more time so they popped out of the softened part and called it a day. It's a little too pink and white, and I thought about introducing some raw sienna somewhere, but decided to stop while I'm ahead. I don't know if it strictly achieves what Emma was going for, but the tension I feel when I look at it assures me that I took a risk!

"Russian Mona"—charcoal, acrylic paints, and Stabilo All marking pencil on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, approx. 9x12 inches.