Details, details

After I painted the stencil accents onto my "Akata Witch" portrait the other day, I took the leftover acrylic paint and made a particularly vibrant background for another portrait. So today, it was time to paint something in acrylic. I thought about another book character, but instead settled on that book's author, Nnedi Okorafor, as my subject. She is a genial-looking woman with some super wild hair, and I thought it would be fun to immortalize her alongside her character, Sunny Nwazue.

I found a photo in which I particularly liked her expression, but her hair was down, and the top of her head had been cropped off. Since her characteristic hairdo is with her hair up in a giant twisty beehive, I looked for and found another photo with that hairstyle in which she was holding her head at almost the same angle, and then used the face from the former and the hair from the latter to make what I wanted.

Many people who paint in acrylic don't start with a drawing, like watercolor painters mostly do; since the medium is opaque, you end up painting over a lot of the lines of your drawing as you go along. But I still like to start with a drawing, even if I do have to paint over some of it, just to have a general idea of where I'm going.

I worked hard on this portrait all morning and part of the afternoon; the skin tones and shadows were challenging, as was the 3/4 pose, and I wanted to get it just right. Finally, after a million small tweaks, I decided I was done...but somehow she just didn't look right. I kept looking at the photos: Did I get the angle of the eyes wrong? Are the features too small for the head? Is the body too big for the head? Is it the hairline? I couldn't figure it out. I was about to ball up and throw away the palette page with all my leftover paint on it, when it suddenly came to me: In painting her skin, I had covered over the lines for her eyebrows, and never put them back in! And with a couple of strokes, her whole face came into focus and looked like the person I was painting. Who knew that eyebrows were so crucial to personality?

This is "Nnedi Okorafor"—acrylic paints, stencil, gesso, spray paint, pencil, Stabilo, on 140-lb. Fluid coldpress watercolor paper, approximately 12x16 inches.

Book illustration

At 2:30 this morning, when it was obvious I wasn't going to sleep, I decided to get up and paint. I had just finished the young adult book Akata Witch, by Nnedi Okorafor, and had an idea to paint a portrait featuring its protagonist, Sunny.

Sunny is a black girl who is albino, and I loved the challenge of achieving that look, with the pale, delicate layers of skin tones. There was a lot going on in the book, and I decided to paint some stuff in the background as "symbolism"—some chili peppers, some morning glories, and Sunny's juju knife with a green blade. Unfortunately, neither the layout nor the rendering of the objects was pleasing, and I ended up three hours later with a figure I loved and a background I hated.

I decided to cover the background with a layer of pale gray gesso, and the portrait looked so much better without the distraction of all the dark, obtrusive junk in the background, but then it felt a little plain. So I pulled colors from her face and hair to do a stencil pattern in acrylics over the gesso, then painted a thin layer of white paint over the top of those, once they were dry, to knock them back a little so that they were an interesting feature but didn't take away from the face. I think it works...? This all took another hour or two, with the result that no sleep was achieved! Maybe a nap is in order, after breakfast.

Here is "Akata Witch"—pencil, watercolors, gesso, acrylic paint, on 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper. It's about 13 inches wide and about 11.5 inches tall.

Playing with effects

This week's Let's Face It 2022 lesson was with Angela Kennedy, who always likes to do fun backgrounds and effects. For her reference, she picked two old-fashioned ladies in fancy dresses with "quirky" hairdos, and I liked them well enough; but I decided instead to do a couple of girls from the working class, also with interesting (but different) hair and clothes, and I changed the color scheme from cool to warm, since they were leaning up against a brick wall.

First thing we did was draw our figures onto watercolor paper. Then we applied a very wet layer of watercolor (hers was blue and green, mine was orange and purple), and while it was still wet, we sprinkled the whole thing with table salt—which, if you catch it just right, makes lovely blooms in the paint. Mine were not nearly as bloom-y as hers or those of some others who did the lesson, but I have only done this once or twice before and not in years, so I settled for it.

After this was dry (which was an interminable wait!), we removed the salt, then painted the faces and any other skin that was showing with a couple of thin layers of white gesso to get rid of the bloom effect there and create a ground for detail. Then we outlined the figures with pen (she used Micron, I used Uniball), and when that was dry, we began to paint in the details.

It was a challenge to paint shadows yet still let the pretty dappled background show through as much as possible, but I think I did okay with that, at least on the clothes. I did choose to go with a dramatic dark for the alleyway that receded behind the block wall against which they were posed, and I put in some vague indication of the block shapes in the background—maybe too many, it distracts a little from the figures—and added the one girl's shadow.

The last part was to put the details into the face, which was the most challenging part, since the faces are only about 1.5 inches across and my tiniest brush (except for my rigger) is a #8! But I managed to produce some specific features, and am fairly pleased with my results.

I think these girls were some kind of factory workers. I thank them for leaving a nice pose for me to discover.

"Working Class Friends"—pencil, pen, salt, watercolors, gesso, Uniball, and gel pen on 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.

Significant women

It's been a while since I painted someone in the news, someone who signifies a milestone for our country and culture—but what could be a better thing to celebrate right now, in the midst of gerrymandering, book banning, and the erosion of women's rights, than the appointment to the Supreme Court of our land of its first Black woman?

So I reverted to the style I used when I was painting a lot of these, back a couple of years ago—I got out my Uniball and my Daler Rowney acrylic inks, and memorialized one of the victories for which President Biden and the Democrats can be proud. But no one should be prouder than Ketanji Brown Jackson, for an achievement this epic at the tender age of 51! She is the first, but may she not be the last, and may she render fair judgments for a good long career.

The likeness isn't perfect—her nose is a little longer than this, as is her chin, and I think her forehead is a bit narrower—but I do feel like I captured her palpable joy.

"Victorious KBJ"—Uniball Vision, Daler Rowney acrylic inks, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 (with a 1/2-inch border).

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.