Stripes, hands, underpainting

The first lesson of the year from Let's Face It 2023 is chock full of stuff to learn. First of all, I'm working big—an 18x24-inch canvas—because the subject matter just seemed to call for it (and Kara Bullock's example is even larger). Second, we're doing Kara's signature method, which is to do an underpainting in Burnt Umber Light, and then paint over it with just black and white paint, letting some of the burnt umber show through. Third, we're doing stripes, and hands, neither of which is so easy.

I chose not to do the reference photo Kara used (her charming and photogenic cousin), not because I don't like her as a model but because I want to end up with something different than a copy that looks like everyone else's piece. I found a girl I really liked, but instead of a striped shirt she was wearing a strapless dress, and instead of having her hands up around her face or in her hair, they were below the margin of the photo. Undaunted, I then went online, found a girl with her arms crossed, wearing a boat-neck raglan-sleeved striped shirt (I just had to pick the hardest one to duplicate), posed at more or less the same angle as my model, and grafted the shirt and the one arm that would naturally appear within the proportions of this picture onto my own reference photo. I think it works okay, although the body feels a little small in comparison to the head!

There are lots of steps to this project—first we gessoed the canvas to give it some texture, and then we put a thinned-out coat of the Burnt Umber Light all over the canvas, leaving white showing through here and there. After that came the drawing of the subject (I used a grid of white charcoal), which I made using a Sanguine conté pencil so it would match with the undercoat.

Next came the underpainting of the subject herself in the burnt umber, using it to specify the darks and shadows of the portrait; there are some issues here that I will deal with in the final painting (the nose is not quite right, nor is the top of the head/hair, and I could hardly see the hand), but this gives a kind of map to follow with the darks and lights.

After the underpainting was done, I departed a bit from Kara's instruction method. She had us using the "Fluid" version of acrylics, which come in a bottle and are more like poster paint, while I generally use what's known as heavy-body acrylics, the thick ones from the tubes. I had always wanted to try the fluid acrylics, but discovered that, contrary to expectation, I didn't like them at all. I thought it would be more like working with watercolors, but instead I just felt out of control with them, and didn't like either the consistency or the level of opacity. So I switched back to my tube acrylics and went on to paint the picture using my own techniques.

Because my model was in a warm light in which her shadows looked similar to the burnt umber, I kept some of that in the picture to model the face, rather than going straight black and white. I'm such a color junkie that it's hard for me not to revert to color—any color—when I work. I actually meant to retain more, and I also intended for this picture to be much more "painterly" than it turned out to be—she is more smooth and blended than I had planned. But I am generally fairly happy with this, given what a struggle it was for me to paint in values rather than in colors.

"Stripes"—Conté pencil and acrylics on canvas, 18x24 inches.

Morph

The question, when studying with art teachers, is when their lessons in combination with your own style morph into something new and you arrive at a painting where you decide to cease giving them partial credit for your achievement. I don't think I'm quite there yet, although most might say this painting is my own. I took inspiration from Flo Lee's (@florenceleeandco) method of using the ground within the portrait. This is a weird iteration of that, though, because rather than picking a ground color and leaving it in the face, I picked a face color and used it for the ground!

This reference photo (actually her artist's head shot) of Maria Pace Wynters (@mariapacesynters) was so sweet and endearing that the minute I saw it, I wanted to paint from it. Apart from her wonderful expression, the thing I love about it is how perfectly pink and yellow and white she is, with those wonderful touches of Sienna, so I decided to make her background almost the same color as her skin so that her face would emerge from it in the same organic way that Flo Lee's people emerge from (or are submerged in?) her backgrounds.

I used the palest of tints for this entire picture—Titan Mars Pale (the primary color), Titan Violet Pale, and Naples Yellow (and lots of white, of course)—and introduced darks via Burnt Sienna, Raw Umber, and Cobalt Violet Hue. There is a tiny bit of Payne's Grey in the darks between the hands and chin and for the pupils of the eyes, but otherwise this is all warm colors. I even drew the picture with a Sanguine-colored conté crayon, rather than the usual charcoal, pencil, or pen.

I painted the face yesterday, and it came together exactly as I anticipated, with no major challenges—I got the face shape and the features on first try, and the painting was so fun, to just take that background color and either darken it a bit with a mix of pink and orange, or lighten it with white, introducing a bit of the Cobalt Violet and some Burnt Sienna for the shadows, mixed liberally with the pastels so they are scarcely a few shades darker. Her bleached-blonde hair was fun to paint too.

Today I assayed the paintbrushes, her shirt, and the hands, and spent the entire afternoon (five hours!) swearing at all of them as I went over and over them, trying to bring them up to the standards of the face. With the shirt, I finally gave up and left it purposely vague; the most I was hoping for by the end was that it wouldn't distract too much from her face. I really wish, in retrospect, that I had refrained from filling it in, and left it as a few lines and splashes of color the way Flo does—and I may go back and paint over it to do just that (but not today!).

The hands I am still not happy with, but after an extra hour of fussing with a stroke here,  a line there, a little more shadow immediately erased for a little less shadow, I am giving up and saying "best I can do." So this is a bit more of a mixed bag than I thought it would be yesterday after I got the face down, but I'm mostly happy with it.

I hope Maria doesn't mind my taking her as a subject!

Maria PW"—conté crayon and acrylics on thin birch board, 12x12 inches.

Bonus lesson

Kara Bullock Studios, purveyors of great art classes including Let's Face It every year for the past eight, kindly provided a series of 10 bonus lessons as a Christmas gift for their students and, although intended only to last through Christmas Day, yielded to pleading by those of us too busy to take advantage before then and left them up the rest of this week. I finally got around to watching one of them Tuesday and yesterday, and last night I painted the background for the one that occupied most of my day today, following Holly Beals's lesson on figures and collage.

I had, for almost the first time, an experience that apparently my peers in the class have had all too frequently—I posted a question today: "Does anybody here ever start a painting whose subject you initially found compelling, only to lose interest halfway through?" The 25 answers I received were unanimously in the affirmative, the most disturbing one to me being "I have about 40 paintings you can finish off!" I now count myself lucky that this is practically the first time this has happened to me; perhaps it is luck, or perhaps I generally only choose subjects that don't disappoint...or perhaps I need to be more challenged?

That was certainly an element in this one. First of all, it was working small, in the sense that usually when I use an 11x14 board, it gets filled up by one big head, while today I was painting a scene that included two complete figures plus substantial background. I dislike working small, especially when I am painting with acrylics, because I am not the best at manipulating small brushes to get precise strokes, and get easily frustrated by what I'm picturing versus what emerges on my board.

Second, I chose to find my own reference photo instead of copying the one Holly used, but although I liked the scene, it had several challenges not included in Holly's—way more background and full figures instead of partial; plus the view was from the front instead of from the rear, so I had to deal with faces; and then there were the perspective issues, which I am notorious for avoiding because I am so bad at them. I had pinky-purple brick walls with angles, a turquoise metal pleated door set back between the walls, a platform for the figures to sit on, and people whose heads were much further away than their feet, which loom larger in the foreground. I think the "disinterest" may have been a thin disguise for dismay at having to confront all these in one picture!

Having said ALL of that...I am somewhat pleased with the outcome. The faces are not up to my standards, and a couple of the hands look distressingly paw-like, but I like the textures and colors and contrasts I achieved, and I managed to stay somewhat loose and painterly, which was part of the lesson.

Although I planned to include some collage, ultimately I chose not to fiddle with it. Unless the collage fits integrally into the picture, it seems to me such an artificial kind of thing, and this was no exception; I could choose to rip and tear some bricks, or I could just give an impression of them with paint, and I went with the paint. Part of the problem, also, is that I don't have very many nice collage elements from which to choose, so there's that.

Anyway, enough with the talking. This is on cradleboard, another new experience, and this one I liked. You carry elements of the painting around to the edges of your one-inch-deep board, and you have a finished box you can hang on the wall without a frame. I will be doing more of that!

I'm calling it "Break." It's acrylics on cradleboard, 14x11 inches (plus wraparound).

Writers

I have a customer and fan on Etsy who admired my Joyce Carol Oates and asked about some other specific writers, so I decided to paint one today (no obligation to buy). I thought I would hark back to a couple of years ago and use some of my Daler Rowney inks for an interesting background, but I have forgotten how I did them / lost the knack. (I need to go back and review my Deb Weiers lessons.) So it's mostly just a wash of purple ink glaze that shows up everywhere in the portrait as an underlayer. The rest is watercolor and Uniball pen, with a few white highlights here and there. I included a quote, since that's what I have done with previous author portraits, and here she is, Virginia Woolf.

I didn't get the angle of the face quite right, so it's a little wide at the temple and cheekbone level—it doesn't quite reflect that long, slightly horsey face. I also struggled with the sizing of the drawing and ended up making it a bit larger than planned. But otherwise I'm pleased with the likeness. I kept staring at her lips and finally realized that her mouth reminds me of actress Geena Davis's. I like this bookish quote.

"Virginia Woolf"—Acrylic ink, watercolor, Uniball, and Signo pens (oh, and gesso and stencil for the collar), on 12x12 Fluid coldpress watercolor paper. Available.

And now I'm starving, because I forgot to eat lunch and it's 4:00! Time to fix that.

Muse

I wanted to paint today, but I didn't want such a production as it has become since I started painting in acrylics (the gessoing! the ground coat! the layers!), so I decided to paint a watercolor portrait of my new favorite muse, Jenell del Cid, @Duhhcid on Instagram. She is amazingly photogenic, and also posts with fantastic poses and accoutrements—it's no wonder she's a model for Sktchy, among others.

The fabric of her wrap was wildly patterned, but I didn't have either the energy or the patience for that today, so I went with a solid color. The reference photo was black and white, so I was able to choose my own colors.

I'm not sure I completely did her justice—her bedroom eyes came out a little too wide and not quite deep enough. But I think I captured a likeness, at least.

"Blue Scarf"—pencil and watercolor on 140-lb. Fluid watercolor paper, 12x12 inches.

A reader

I haven't painted anyone in the act of reading for a good long while, but I want to keep doing that and building up my collection of avid readers in art, so I found a reference photo I'd been saving and went to work tonight. I was only going to do the drawing, but the rest of my house was so cold and my studio was so warm (space heater rotating on 75 degrees!) that I started painting at 9:30 and quit at 12:30 when I felt about 80 percent done, with only the hands to paint and then some tweaking of everything else. Probably needless to say, I spent a lot more time on it this morning than anticipated, with the result that it's way past time for lunch!

I tried to leave this one more loose and painterly—the view out the window, which was mixed blues and greens with some yellow and white highlights, lent itself to a soft focus, so I tried for that in the foreground as well. I painted the board sky blue as an underpainting, and initially intended to do this one as a Flo Lee, with the ground left in the face, but then decided the theme didn't lend itself to that, so I simply left bits of blue to peek out here and there, in her hair, and robe, and hands. I used a stencil for the wallpaper and was fairly pleased with that, though it's busier than I intended to go.

This one is "Lizzie Reads"—let's see if anyone can figure out why. Pencil, stencil, and acrylics on 1/8th-inch birch board, 12x16 inches.

Layers

Two months later, and I finally convinced myself to make some art. I don't know what happened—a combination of that dratted heat wave with the beginning of my UCLA Readers' Advisory class on the first of October that necessitated a lot of preparation, before and during, to bring it all up to date after a two-year hiatus and some previously undiscovered research on next-level RA just took me out of the painting mindset, and even though I have had time here and there, I just kept playing Words with Friends and binge-watching series on Netflix.

At first I didn't think I would care to assay this week's lesson; although I greatly admire Maria Pace-Wynters's highly colored and beautifully intricate works, I know myself well enough to know I don't have the patience for all of that eensy-weensy detail. But I was itching to try a few of her techniques, and my friend Phoebe, who did the lesson in a greatly simplified but still gorgeous manner, made me decide to get over myself and give it a shot.

Maria's first layer is collage, and although I didn't have the beautiful scraps of paper she has saved up over decades for this purpose, I did have some fun patterned tissue papers lying around, so I did my best with those, applying them to my birch board with acrylic medium. Then I added some glossy acrylic spray in turquoise and orange, and let the first step dry overnight.

The next step was to draw my image, which I took (with her permission) from @DUHHCID (Jenell Del Cid)'s Instagram page. I thought that I had recently "discovered" her, and asked her permission to paint her, but later found an old Sktchy portrait of her from about 2.5 years ago that I painted for the 30-day challenge (it's so bad I won't even show it here!), so that was funny. Anyway, Maria used a profile reference and incorporated flowers, so I settled on a profile photo of Jenell contemplating a tiger lily, and got to work.

Yesterday I did the pencil sketch and then got caught up in other "life" stuff and didn't get back to it, but this morning I was determined to make some progress, so after medicating Gidget (and parenthetically, why would anyone think it was a good idea to make antibiotic drops for cats look and smell like Bazooka bubble gum?) and eating some oatmeal, I squeezed out a bunch of colors onto my palette and got to work about 10 a.m.

Following Maria's example, I started with her characteristic stark white face and worked outward from there. I usually go for more realistic tones, but I do love the contrast of the white-white skin with the red cheeks and Phthalo Turquoise shadows—rather Renoir-esque. I stopped at this point to take a photo, because I realized I hadn't documented the drawing stage. After that, I got so caught up in the painting that I forgot completely about my camera until I was nearly done, and decided to let it go until I could scan the finished piece.

After doing the face, I followed her example by painting in most of the background so as to get definition around my image, and this is where I ran into trouble. Those pesky pieces of tissue didn't stick to my board with the application of acrylic medium the way Maria's did to her work; I'm wondering if she had a base coat of something underneath, because they just did not want to adhere to the raw board, and kept peeling up. I looked in vain for my bottle of Elmer's to glue it down, so I ended up lifting off and discarding a couple of significant-sized pieces, including all but two of the big gold dots that I thought would look cool shimmering through; but I managed to get the confetti tissue to stick pretty well, so that at least stayed. I like how it comes up out of the top of her head and also surrounds the tiger lily, as if the lily provoked thoughts that are flying out of both of them at once.

I was much happier with the image of Jenell than I was with the tiger lily; I'm not particularly adept at painting flowers. But after doing a rather flat rendering, I was inspired by Maria's exhortation to spread all the colors all around the painting to promote unity, so I picked up some of the Phthalo Turquoise on my brush and used it for the darkest shadows on the lily stem and leaves, which greatly enhanced the contrasts, and then threw some into her hair as well, and darkened the shadows of the blouse.

One of the last things I did was to use a stencil with a nearly dry brush of white paint to create the lace ruffle collar and jabot. It wasn't exactly as I envisioned it, but I like how it turned out, and that the flowers reflect the approximate shape of an open lily, to echo the main feature.

I thought about doing some outlining with white (or black) as Maria does, but ultimately decided to leave this soft and diffuse and not get fussy, since it's not my talent. 

I got so caught up painting that I worked straight through the lunch hour and finished up about 4:00, then picked at tiny details, scanned, and posted. I really enjoyed this lesson! Maybe I won't wait so long between this and the next.

"Jenell with Lily"—pencil, collage, and acrylic on 1/8th-inch birch board, 12x16 inches.