Spark eluded

This is one of those times when I chafe against my lack of perception about how to unfailingly capture the spark. This portrait is based on a photo of my friend Claudia's Aunt Anna, who is a beautiful woman with attitude. I captured the likeness pretty well, although I didn't quite get right the angle of the face and the chin tilt; I know it's a well done portrait, and she still looks beautiful, even regal; but I feel like the portrait is completely lacking in that intangible something that makes her Anna—a spirited attitude that speaks out of her eyes and says simultaneously, I know I am beautiful and, What's it to you?

The difficulty begins with the eyes, and this is a problem that I am solving more often lately but still haven't mastered: How do you make your subject look at you? In her photo she is staring right at the photographer, and that's part of the attitude of daring that comes across so forcefully there and not at all here, where despite every effort I made, she is staring off into the distance instead of looking at the viewer. It's so frustrating that I find myself yelling at the portrait, "Look at me! Over here!" as I move the highlights, elongate the pupil, change the shape of the eye, all to no avail. She just ain't gonna do it.

So, while some might see this as an accomplished portrait, I am made aware, once again, of how far I still have to go to master this discipline.

Or, I could simply draw and paint more abstractly and not worry about it; but that's a question for another day!

"Aunt Anna 1"—graphite and carbothello in Bee mixed media sketchbook, 9x12 inches.

Drawing once more

I really wanted to make a painting today, but I just couldn't settle on a subject. Then I found this photo of a homeless man, and realized doing justice to him would be difficult in paint, but maybe more expressive with pencil. So here is another line-and-shadow rendering, with accents of white Carbothello pencil and Signo gel pen and some watercolor enhancement for the eyes, cheeks, and lips (and coat), on tan paper to help with the weathered look. 9x11 on Strathmore toned tan 184-lb. mixed media paper.

Graphite, Day Two

Patrick Greenwood challenged us to do a graphite "morning drawing" every day this week. I don't know that I'll go that far, but I decided to try another one today, and went for a little more ambitious pose/angle and more challenging features.

If I'm going to do more of these, I think I'm going to have to invest in what some swear by as a secret weapon, the Black Wing pencil, for a softer, darker lead. And also learn how to blend and smudge better! And maybe find out what to use for fixative after.

"Willow"—graphite pencils HB-6B (and a little Carbothello for blush), in Bee multimedia sketchbook, 9x12 inches.

Graphite

Every Monday they keep throwing pencil drawings at us as assignments, and every Monday I have deviated and used another medium. Today I finally decided to give in and do one. It's not that I can't do it; it's that I don't do it that well, and also I don't enjoy it near as much as I do ink or paint of ANY kind. But...here it is.

This was Patrick Greenwell's lesson, and I do admire his drawings. I didn't use the reference photo from which he worked, though, mostly because after only three weeks I am heartily sick of seeing the same face a thousand times every single week as each student does her version of the model. I told Phoebe today that one requirement for taking this class should be that you watch the lesson, then apply it to your own reference so we aren't all so heartily bored by the time the first thousand get done and then the hundreds of stragglers keep posting over the next six months!

We were supposed to use a photo with a difficult angle, so I chose this one with an extreme uptilted chin, to show foreshortening. At least one person will (I hope!) recognize the subject of this drawing, while for others it will just be another pretty face!

This was done with a hard and two soft leads, and then I went back in with a little Carbothello colored pencil for the blush on the cheeks and the brown of the eyes.

"Chin Tilt"—H, 2B, 6B pencils and Carbothello in Bee multimedia sketchbook, 9x11 inches.

Another portrait in Payne's Grey

I decided to try another monotone portrait in Payne's Grey on grey-toned paper tonight, again with a little bit of blush added. I used for my reference a picture I had saved from a friend's photography shoot, excerpting only the mother's head out of the family photo of she and her husband and two daughters. I particularly liked the angle of her head, and that she was looking down through almost-closed lids.

I didn't get the angle of the head quite extreme enough, and thus the eyes were also harder to get right—it should look as if she's looking down, but I'm not sure she doesn't just look like her eyes are closed. I considered putting some whites in there, but they really don't show at all in the photo, so...no.

I also tried a mixed media thing that didn't really come off. I used some Daler Rowney Shimmering Green ink as a background, and apart from tinting the grey card faintly darker and giving a slicker surface, you can't even tell it's there, which is disappointing; the shimmering gold ink pops on this surface and I thought the green would do the same.

I was pretty happy with the texture I achieved for her sweater, which was a tedious process.

Addendum to post: I woke up at 5:30 and decided to mess with her, so I put in a background coat of pearlescent white ink over the green. Then I took a stiffer watercolor brush (I had been working with my swishy Silver) and amped up some of the darks in eyes, brows, lips, and shadows, and reiterated some of the wispy hairs that had gotten blurred out by the white. I also tweaked the directionality of the eyes. I think it's an improvement...although it shows more in person than in this scan.

"Mother Love"—pencil, Payne's Grey watercolor, and Daler Rowney Pearlescent White ink on grey-toned smooth 184-lb. mixed media paper, 9x12 inches.

Acrylic inks

I haven't done any work with my acrylic inks for some time now—there was a period of about a year, not too long ago, when I used nothing else, but when I started painting with acrylics (opaque) I got out of the habit, and when I didn't use acrylics, I went back to watercolor to develop a looser style.

But this week's instructor at LFI2022, Christa Forrest, specified acrylic inks as the week's medium, and I was happy to return to them. Turns out, however, that the ones she uses appear to be a lot more like semi-opaque liquid acrylics than like the mostly transparent Daler Rowney inks I use. Her painting this week was also painted on a birch board with a watercolor ground, and I didn't have one of those, nor do I enjoy painting on top of that ground with inks, because they seem to sit on top and I prefer the permeability of paper with inks. So already I was planning in what ways I would need to diverge from her lesson: No birch board, transparent inks on paper, no Procreate grid to start me off; and also, I wasn't enamored of her model. It's not that it was a difficult angle (it was), or that she wasn't an attractive girl (she was), but that I just didn't care for a piece in which so much of the face was cut off—it was pretty much all cheek, neck, and ear, with the focus being on her wild head of hair.

So, I considered finding a different model but making use of the same colors, layout, and wild curly locks, and then realized that she was staring me in the face from Christa's Instagram page. An artist portrait is a bold segue, but I've done it before, so I decided to go for it.

I feel like there is something essential missing from her expression, although I have looked over every bit of it minutely and can't figure out what I missed. I had to redraw her eyes several times, as they are more wideset than they initially seem; and for once, I think that rather than making someone's eyes too large, an all-too-easy thing to do, I instead erred on the side of slightly too small. I also didn't quite get the angle of the face/head right, but since I lined the features up with the angle I did capture, that's all good.

I really enjoyed working with the inks again, particularly because I combined it with using my water-ful Silver Velvet brush to blend things more loosely than before. I also had big fun with the hair, to which I gave a purple undercoat and then combined Payne's Grey and white Daler Rowneys with final dark accents in black India ink. The shirt was supposed to be collage, but given how poorly that sometimes works on paper, I gave it a pass and left her in her simple purple shell top.

"Christa"—pencil and Daler Rowney inks on 140-lb. Fluid coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.

Mixed Media Massacre

This was a lesson in paying attention. And you would think, after last week, when I used gold ink instead of white to do the highlights on my waterlogged girl, that I would have been more careful, but no.

This was Week Two on PYHAS (Paint Your Heart and Soul) 2022, conducted by the talented and eclectic Joan Martin, and it was an exercise in ultimate use of mixed media. First we were to sketch and shade the portrait with soft pencil on a tan board background; then we were to roll on a thin layer of white paint (acrylic or gesso) with a soft foam rubber roller, paying attention to putting the paint where the highlights of the picture naturally fell; then we were to go back in with a black oil-based colored pencil to redefine our drawing; after that was tinting with colored ink; then we were supposed to intensify certain areas by going over them with various shades of gray marker; and finally, we were to do highlights with our white gel pens. Oh, and if you felt like it, you could also put in white marks with the edge of a credit card, but that one was optional!

Here is a portrait of Mimi, Joan's finished product. Cool, huh?

So, to continue being my contrary self, I decided that rather than painting Mimi, who Joan chose because she has a wealth of life in her face with which to play around, I would do a portrait of my friend Phoebe. It was the white hair that inspired me; Phoebe has a shock of stand-up white and gray/black hair that's fun to paint.

I did the pencil sketch and it was fine; I'm not much of a sketcher, infinitely preferring contour drawing, but I can do it when I have to. My shading isn't up to snuff, but since it was going to be subsumed in a bunch of other media, I went for it and did what I had to do.

I didn't have any tan board, so I used my gray mixed media paper, which holds up well against almost anything. It didn't bother me that it wasn't tan, although it did make it harder to then achieve skin tones over the top. Oh, well.

I moved to the next step, which was to roll thin white paint onto the drawing using a soft foam roller. Hmm. I don't have a soft foam roller. But I do have a hard rubber roller, which I use for all my abstract backgrounds that I do for my acrylic paintings, I'll just use that! That'll work!

Right. Not the greatest idea. I basically obliterated two-thirds of the drawing and made a big mess, including getting splatters of white paint in the clear space out beyond the face. No worries, I thought, I'll just paint that all in with the white, and then I'll salvage the face with my black colored pencil by over-drawing and shading everything I did before. After all, I can still see the basic outlines, and can refer back to the photo to recreate it.

This is where the crucial not-paying-attention moment (see "gold highlights" above) reared its ugly head. As if I hadn't given myself enough of a challenge with the badly rolled paint, I reached out for a black colored pencil and instead picked up a Stabilo All. People who know what that pencil does are immediately groaning in sympathy. See, it makes a nice solid black line; but when you put water on whatever you drew with it, whatever the pencil is made of (does anyone know? I don't!) is activated and turns dark, dark, dark, and also spreads like a mofo.

So, when I moved on to the next step, which was to "colorize" the portrait with my acrylic inks, I got a rude awakening when everything—line work and shading—started turning BLACK. I don't have a photo of that step, because I was desperately trying to keep it from going south.

I almost tossed it at that point but then I decided, You have just created more of a challenge for yourself, don't be a wuss. So I went ahead and activated the Stabilo everywhere, giving myself a lot darker outlines and darks than I had planned, but it mostly worked. I blotted a LOT.

I let that dry thoroughly because in theory Stabilo only activates once, it doesn't keep on going (lies, all lies), and then I went back in with my acrylic inks, in shades of Flesh, Red Earth, and (of course because it is Phoebe) Opera Pink. Some of the color got muddy from the Stabilo, and some of the Stabilo lifted too much because of the color; again, I blotted, I pushed the colors around, I thinned things out.

I didn't really need to use the gray markers to intensify, which was good because I didn't have any; but I did use a couple of Conté crayons in Sanguine and White to feather and soften some areas over the top of the Stabilo mess.

Finally, I went back in with my white Signo gel pen and fiddled with the highlights until I got them the way I wanted them.

So here is an extremely effortful version of my friend Phoebe, styling courtesy of Joan Martin. It's kinda cool; but I could have painted a "normal" painting in half the time with probable better results!