Attempting the abstract

 Our Let's Face It 2022 lesson this week was with Dina Wakley, who does a lot of abstract multimedia work, sometimes including figures and faces, oftentimes with collage, writing, and random printing/scribbling included. This is a hard one for me, but I gave it a shot.

I decided to add an extra something to her lesson by first employing a stenciled background before putting on the collage, and although it was initially intended as a kind of marbled sky look, it actually worked into my final concept, which was more a cyclone effect.

She suggested using some poses from fashion magazines to come up with the blocked-out painted figure of the person, which was probably a mistake for me, the literalist, because I added in clothing outlines instead of just sticking to the basic form. But I had fun with the collaged words and with the "ischemic" writing, which was a new term to me—it's basically giving the appearance of something written in cursive, but without including discernible words or language.

My final result felt to me like a person caught up in a storm of words, which was perfect considering I was having an extended and somewhat contentious discussion on Facebook at the same time as I was making this piece of "art."

"Cyclone"—stencil, gesso, collage, acrylic paints, Stabilo All, pen, on 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.

PHYAS inspiration

I was going to call this "PYHAS assignment," but it's far enough from the example that I figured I'd call it inspiration instead. The one in the lesson was done on canvas with acrylic paints, but I didn't have a small canvas and wasn't in the mood today to break out the acrylics (they are still sometimes a struggle for me), so I tried to mimic the assignment using watercolor and inks only, with limited success.

First of all, there were supposed to be stencils in the background and later in the foreground, but trying to do stencils using watercolor gives an inexact result unless you use them thickly and "pounce" them on with a flathead brush, which can defeat the purpose of them dropping to the background. So the swirly ones that comprise the light source worked pretty well, as did the splats behind her head, but the leafy branch turned into a hot mess.

I was a bit heavy-handed with the pencil and didn't remember to pick it up with my kneaded eraser before painting, so some of the pencil lines were preserved that shouldn't have been, notably the forehead line.

Finally, I broke out the gold paint to do her earring and then something came over me and I started splashing it around thinking it would work for the highlights, which it did not—it just proved a distraction.

So—oh well, it's a somewhat pretty picture that I will do better another time. I was happy with the effect of the stencil representing the light on her upturned face, especially the stripey bits; and I was okay with her hair, especially the tiny bits of green showing through.

"Basking"—pencil, watercolors, and acrylic inks on toned tan mixed media paper, approx. 9x12 inches.

Revisiting Ink

I loved this week's Let's Face It lesson with Dylan Sara, whose work I have been following for a while on Instagram. His drawing is beautifully delicate, as is his hand with a brush. I didn't want to go so far as to make my own inks, as he does, so I went back to my Daler Rowney inks, which I haven't used in quite a while, to get more or less the same effect.

I also loved the model he used; but I always dislike ending up with a painting of the same person everyone else painted, so even though I did like the reference photo, I went looking and found one of my own. The exercise was to paint more than just a face; the hands included in his reference were much more complex than these, so I cheated a little, only having to paint the backs of the hands with the fingers folded under. But I feel like I made up for it a bit by incorporating her beautiful wild hair, which wasn't easy to mimic!

Here are some process pix—my pencil sketch, and the first layer using only Raw Sienna:

   

I was sorry, after I'd done it, that I didn't stick with the monochromatic shades of brown and gold for the entire picture. The model was wearing a really pale peachy-pink sweatshirt, and the shadows looked turquoise in the light, so I did that, but it stuck out too much in contrast with the sienna, umber, and flame orange I used for the face and hands, hair and background. I ended up going over it with a thin layer of raw sienna, which knocked everything back a bit. I should have left it there; instead I decided to do another layer in purple, which had the unexpected effect of bringing the pink back out. Oh, well. I wish I'd just left it pale yellow or something in the first place.

This was challenging, and also larger than I usually work (12x16 instead of 9x12), so it took me quite a while—I started at 6:30 a.m. and didn't finish until 11:30 (although I took a 30-minute breakfast break in there). But I'm happy to get back to painting after somehow not finding the time this past week, despite not feeling like I accomplished much else!

"Aaliyah"—Pencil and Daler Rowney inks on 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, approx. 12x16 inches.

My Muse

I have been waiting for my birch boards to arrive from Dick Blick so that I could do this assignment of Julie Lee's from last week (referenced in the last post) on a more permanent surface, but I got an email today saying they were back-ordered. I didn't want to do it on canvas—I haven't gotten used to how acrylic acts on canvas, I have only painted two pictures on that surface and didn't like the level of detail I was not able to achieve; so I decided to go ahead and do this on watercolor paper, and I will just have to frame it if I want to hang it. Which I think I do; I'm pretty pleased with it.

Here are some process paintings: the background, and the sketch, in charcoal:

    

Julie paints opposite to Emma, in that she puts the shadows in first and then moves to the lights, whereas with Emma we start with the lightest lights and then go darker, so it took a little adjustment to get used to that, and I had to rework some stuff several times. I'm usually pretty fast with the portraits, but this one took me almost five hours. Of course, the one thing Julie left out of the lesson was how to know when to call it a day; so about 45 minutes of that was finicky tweaks!

I feel like I caught the likeness pretty well, although the head tilt isn't quite right and the forehead might be a tad tall; but these are minor details. The glasses were an interesting challenge, since this pair has color on the tops but fades to clear on the bottoms, but they also cast a shadow on my face. It may have been a mistake to use green and turquoise as the shadows, in colors so close to those on the glasses themselves; I don't want the shadows to read as part of the glasses. I don't think they do...?

I learned a lot from Julie's generous and wonderfully detailed lesson. Among the things: Vine charcoal works well as an underdrawing, if you then set it with some water so it doesn't mix with the paints. Use some red in the darks instead of making them flat black. Don't worry too much about the actual color of things, it will all read right in the end. And be spontaneous with your brush strokes. (I'm less adept at that last one.)

Here is "Me, My Muse." Acrylics, vine charcoal, and a little Liquitex gold acrylic medium (this shows up better in person), on 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 12x16 inches (less a border, so actually 11x15).

Serendipity? or fate?

This week's lesson from PYHAS2022 is from artist Julie Lee. Julie and I have a special relationship of which neither of us was aware until recently (and she still isn't but she's about to be): I saw a black and white photo of her online (not labeled) and saved it in my Reference Photos folder as a possible portrait subject; then, in December of last year, I made a painting of her that I called "Substrate Woman" (not yet knowing who she was), because I had created a beautiful abstract background with leftover acrylics and wanted to try painting just the lights and darks of a figure over it, leaving the substrate showing through for the rest of the skin and hair.

I did so, but didn't feel like it was a total success, since the contrasts of the Titanium White and Payne's Grey were a little extreme against my combination of warm browns and yellows. Then I set it aside.

Today, after the absolutely masterful lesson from Julie (painting a self portrait), I wasn't yet ready to do my own, since I want to order a birch panel on which to paint it; so I went back and dragged out my portrait of Julie and, using some of the blending and color placement techniques I observed in her lesson, I got out some Naples Yellow, some Raw Sienna, some primary yellow and a cobalt blue, and a bit of Payne's Grey and did a more painterly layer over the previous portrait, still leaving some substrate showing but doing a better job of accentuating and blending.

Parts of it got a bit smudgy, since I had used a navy blue Stabilo pencil on the original, which smears when you hit it with anything wet. But I managed not to do too much damage there, or else covered it up, and I'm much happier with my result.

I will do my own, using all of Julie's methods and advice, once my birch board arrives. Can't wait! It's a really exciting lesson.

"Julie Lee 2"—pencil, acrylic paints, and Stabilo on 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x11 inches.

Substitution failure

Our lesson this week in LFI2022 was to do a monoprint of a person in profile, and then draw their portrait over the top. Our teachers always encourage us to use whatever materials we have, if we don't buy the specific tools, but sometimes there's just no substitution. In this case, I don't have a printer hooked up to my computer at the moment, and can't access one right now, so couldn't create the monoprint. I foolishly decided to try to fake it.

With the monoprint, you take a computer printout of a mirror image of your intended drawing, you scribble all over it with pastels, or Conté crayons, or CarbOthello pencils, and then you wet your (smooth) watercolor paper and put your monoprint face down on that to transfer the smudgy vague outline and shadows of your image onto the page. The teacher did this three times in a row, just to get sufficient background.

Then, you look at your opposite image, and draw in details loosely over the top of your more vague background, and you get a lovely squiggly loose shaded portrait.

What I ended up doing was drawing the mirror image in pencil, then acting as if that were the print-out and putting on the transfer media. But...my transfer image ripped when it got wet (too much water? Conté pencils too hard?) so I could only get two layers, and they weren't dark enough. (I think pastels would have made this a whole different exercise...)

Also, the teacher used a profile of a guy with a big cloud of curly hair and a beard and mustache, which provided lots of room for "squiggles" in the final drawing, while I short-sightedly chose this girl with a crown of braids, which are quite defined.

After the transfer, I went back and put a drawing over the top. It's too tight and precise for it to satisfy the objective of this lesson, and doesn't have the beautiful graduated shadows and light that the monoprint should have given. It basically looks like a smudgy, not-very-good portrait drawn in Conté pencil and finger-smudged. (And the only smooth watercolor paper I had was toned tan.)

Oh, well. I will try this again at the end of the month when my printer is up and running. But thanks, Juna, for the lesson!

Pencil, Conté pencil, CarbOthello pencil, and Stabilo All on 184-lb. toned tan mixed media paper, 7.5x10.5 inches.

Painting people you know

Painting people you know is sometimes the most perilous undertaking! You can't look at them objectively; you see them through the filter of long relationship, and you may not be aware as you paint of adding in opinions, personality quirks, or other knowledge of them that you don't possess with an anonymous reference photo. You would think that long acquaintance would lend extra skill to capturing an exact likeness, but in fact (for me, at least) it sometimes has the opposite effect, because I can't remain objective.

All that is to say, I have painted portraits (sometimes many) of people I know, and have never been quite satisfied with capturing their look. Antithetically, sometimes striving so hard to capture their likeness can also suppress their personality, so that it turns out to be a pretty picture but with no individuality shining through.

I may just be musing about all of this as a pre-emptive disclaimer, since I am posting a picture of one of the people closest to me in life, and I'm hoping people don't shriek and say, That looks nothing like her! I don't think they will; but I do admit that I once again have failed to quite capture that charming but damn elusive nose!

Here is Kirsten, in a silly moment when her unruly hair has taken on a life of its own and sprouted out of its bun to occupy a larger atmosphere.

"Kirsten and Hair"—Pencil and watercolor on 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 7 3/4 x 8 inches.