Painting and photography

I returned, this week, to one of my favorite models, who reliably posts wonderful photos of herself on Instagram that are just begging to be painted. But I started reflecting, while halfway through this one, on what it is that I'm doing, and whether it is truly creative or is just sponging off of someone else's creativity.

The portraits I paint are, for the most part, faithful to the reference photos. There's a different background, usually, and I may crop parts out or pick an unusual angle, but I am always attempting to capture a likeness and sometimes also the clothing and accoutrements provided by the model and photographer, so...what, exactly, am I producing that is my own? Yes, I'm showing my skill for faithful copying, and sometimes adding my own color sensibilities to a black and white photo or to one whose colors aren't pleasing, but otherwise...?

It's true that most people who paint people use models of some kind, or photographs, but unless it's a commissioned work meant to look like its subject, often that's just a jumping-off point for an image that the artist then adapts to their own aesthetic to the point where the subject would be unrecognizable to their own mother. Up to this point in my painting "career," I have taken pride in my ability to catch a likeness, but does it go beyond skill and become art simply because I have rendered it in paint? I'm not sure.

I know that I am enjoying making these backgrounds by using a stencil to mimic nature or wallpaper or whatever. I know that I like being able to make the model pop with my use of color. But I'm going to have to think about the rest of it and see whether it's time for a shift in perspective.

This is, once again, Jenell del Cid, dressed up to look (at least to me) sort of like a Spanish flamenco dancer, with her upswept 'do, long beaded earrings, and waist-cinching dress. You have caught her checking her look in her hand mirror before she goes out for the evening. Her dress was odd, and I thought about changing it, but in the end left it vaguely similar—it was a flower print, but it wasn't an all-over pattern; instead, the flowers were scattered here and there on a paler field. It almost felt too busy to add the flowers, against that stencil background, but I went ahead.

This one is a little more "painterly" and not quite as blended. I had a little trouble with the scan (I have to do 12x16s in two parts and Photoshop them together), so the actual painting has more hair at the top and a little breathing room, and the mirror is also not quite so close to the border as it is here.

Acrylics, pencil, stencil, on thin birch board, 12x16 inches.

Something different

I have workshops at the library coming up during the month of July. They are mostly contour drawing or watercolor, but for one workshop the librarian who hired me asked, Can we do something that somehow relates to summer reading club? You can imagine that those were magic words to utter to me, the former librarian and current readers' advisor who loves nothing better than to paint what I'm reading! So we are going to ask the participants to bring what they're reading (or go out into the library and find something on the day), and we're going to draw and paint the books.

I wanted to show them the kind of thing I have done before so it would inspire them to do something fun, so I made a flyer featuring drawings of single books, books with a scene from the story as background, multiple books in one drawing, made-up book covers for those books whose contents you love but whose cover is wholly inadequate (or downright ugly!), and a portrait of a person reading his book. It's a little busy, but I think it will serve as both flyer beforehand and template during the class. I hope the librarian likes it...

Rose's hand

As an artist friend pointed out, if you enslave yourself to copying photos, you will get the bad along with the good. That was certainly the case with this painting of "Rose"—I painted her hand exactly as it was, and it looked raw, unfinished, and amateurish next to the rest of the painting, even though I was faithful about copying it. As Phoebe said when I showed her the reference photo and asked for advice, "Well, I'll be! you did paint it exactly as it is. It's just not nice looking!"

I had the option of leaving it and justifying it to myself by saying "that's what was in the reference photo," or making it better—either by painting it out altogether (Phoebe's suggestion, and it was a good one) or by substituting another hand. I was tempted to just paint it out, but my stubborn streak took over, and I decided I wasn't going to be conquered by that hand. It was a "duh!" moment when Pat said, "Um, can't you find a photo of a hand that will work with this pose? I've heard of editing parts that just don't look right...." I don't know why this didn't occur to me, on my third or fourth try, but it didn't.

I went on Google Images and searched for "hand on chest" and "hand on heart" and found three or four, but nothing with the exact angle of the original, so I got a little creative and substituted something entirely different. I put my painting into Photoshop Elements, then pasted in three different arms/hands at 60 percent opacity so I could see through to angle and line them up with what was there, and then used the one that worked the best without extending past her chest.

I painted out the old hand, painted in the portion of chest revealed by moving the hand, and waited for it all to dry. Then I drew in the new hand and arm, and painted them as they appeared, being careful about angles and positioning.

Ninety minutes later, Toni popped up on my Facebook feed and said "You can take a picture of yourself in that pose. It may be easier than finding the perfect reference photo." Visualize me slapping myself in the forehead. It's probably just as well, though; I have my father's giant ham hands and it probably would have looked even more like it didn't belong to Rose.

I can't claim to be a hand pro yet—this one still feels less expert than the surrounding portrait, and doesn't quite feel planted against her chest—but it's exponentially better than what was there before (you can see the old one if you scroll down to my previous post).

Thanks, everybody, for the encouragement (and all the suggestions that should have been obvious but somehow were not!).

"Rose with Roses #2"—with replacement hand! Pencil, acrylics, and stencil on thin birch board, 12x16 inches.

Questionable decisions

This is today's painting—this is Rose. I named her that because she has such a sweet, romantic look to her (the reference photo is an old sepia-tone), and also because I decided before I painted her that she would have a floral background. I ordered some new stencils after the fun I had with the one I used on Janell last week, and one was a cluster of roses, which seemed perfect.

My original plan was to do the background in a darker green and the rose pattern in pink; but after considering that her complexion would be primarily pink and that her simple dress (which I liked and wanted to keep) was a neutral color, I took a risk and made the roses yellow. I liked the combination of the vibrant green and creamy yellow when I painted in the background, but since I painted Rose in the foreground I'm wondering if I made the wrong choice. The background to the photo was extremely dark, and I didn't want that because her hair would disappear into it; but I may have erred too far in the other direction. I wanted the effect of her emerging from a garden, but it's kind of a loud garden!

I thought about redoing the background but the disadvantage with using a stencil is that the texture is there, and hard to cover, even with a thick impasto of paint, and since the portrait itself is relatively smooth, I didn't want a rough-looking border around it. So I'm going to leave it for now and ponder whether it's worth risking the portrait to make the background something more congruent with the figure.

The other challenge with this one was that damn hand. I repainted it four times, and I'm still not happy with it. It is in the exact position as the one in the photo (I made sure, by opening the photo in Photoshop Elements and then overlaying a photo of my painting at 60 percent opacity so I could see both), and the vagueness of the hand is similar to that in the photo, but it looks unfinished and amateurish to me, in comparison to the rest of the portrait. If any of my artist friends have suggestions, I'm listening! But for now, I'm giving up and going with it.

"Rose and Roses"—pencil and acrylics on thin birch board, 12x16 inches.

New challenges

This week I decided that perhaps, rather than taking on new challenges as regards materials and methods, I would instead switch out the type of subject that I paint. I never realized, until I attempted it, how different it is from painting adults to paint children. I have only painted a few and, admittedly, not small children even yet, but rather those approaching adolescence. But even those have different proportions to adults and require a different kind of focus.

I found a reference photo online on one of those nostalgia pages that put up old quirky black-and-whites of random families; the rest of the family was posed sedately in a line in the driveway next to the family car, but the daughter of the house was out in front of the bumper, clutching her hands together and with her mouth dropped open in an expression of astonishment or dismay, it's hard to know.

I didn't quite capture the look on her face—this girl maybe looks more like she's singing a solo in choir!—but I had fun with it, and also, because it was B&W, I got to decide the approximate colors through which she should be interpreted. I chose to do a "ground included" look, in the manner of my heroine Florence Lee, by leaving the dress largely defined by the background color, in order to make her face stand out that much more.

"Astonishment"—pencil and acrylics on thin birch board, 12x16 inches.

Being "painterly"

I complimented someone recently on a painting they shared on Facebook and said "it's very painterly." They didn't know what I meant by that. The actual definition is "characterized by color, stroke, and texture rather than of line." What I was attempting to convey was that she had painted in a looser style, with actual strokes showing, which is something to which I have aspired. I tend to get super blendy and make sure there are no hard edges in my paintings, and while it's an acceptable method, it feels less spontaneous and expressive than I would sometimes like.

Last week's lesson in Let's Face It was by Simone Scholes (@simonescholesart), who has evolved her style to a more painterly one by taking her reference photo and pixelating or "posterizing' it, so that the separate areas of color and shadow are more clearly defined, and then painting from that instead of from the regular reference. It's an interesting approach, and does yield a much less specific yet more emotive image. I didn't have the app she was using and didn't want to download it, so I took my photo into Photoshop Elements instead and approximated what she had done (not quite as successfully).

I definitely didn't go to the extremes to which she goes—hers are almost like paint-by-numbers in a way (I don't mean that as an insult!), in that she has definite separate strokes of paint for color changes, with little blending between them. I can't quite make myself do that, but for me this paint is much more brushy and less tight than usual, so I appreciated the lesson and the idea behind it. Ironically, I think this painting took me longer to produce than a "regular" one would, because I was so focused on achieving that painterly look that I had to keep backing up and replacing things to go with that! But I did enjoy this, and will try another with a conscious focus on strokes rather than blends.

This was a fun one for me to attempt, because I just painted it a few weeks ago, with a line drawing in pen and a wild watercolor palette. Jenell Del Cid is a favorite model, and I didn't feel like I quite captured the amount of startlement in her eyes in the watercolor, so I got to try it again here. I'm pretty happy with it! (My scanner cut off the top 1/4 inch, but I couldn't be bothered to re-scan. There's a little more hair and border at the top than shows here.)

"Jenell What?!" — pencil and acrylics (and stencil)

on thin birch board, 12x12 inches.

Here's the previous version in watercolor (and acrylic inks):

Following in the steps of an idol

I have, for some time, been completely taken with the paintings of Rosso Emerald Crimson (no, I doubt that's her given name, but whatever she wants to be called, I'm fine with it). The combination of perfectly realized portraits with a variety of odd backgrounds that may or may not make sense, and may include clothing and furniture or simply feature a head and shoulders emerging from paint is so beguiling that I return to them again and again.

I almost didn't sign up for Let's Face It 2023 this year; I am already registered for three other classes, none of which has been broached yet, and thought I would focus on those. I especially considered skipping it because there's a lot of drawing going on, with pencils, charcoal, and pan pastels, none of which did I want to do! But when I heard that Rosso would be one of the artists furnishing a painting lesson, I couldn't resist.

Since she paints in oils and I in acrylics, it's not all transferable, but enough of it is to make it an interesting exercise, and I knew that at the very least I could learn some solid color theory (which I did). The paint mixing kind of backfired, since with acrylics the stuff you mix only remains viable for maybe an hour, but I absorbed the theory. I also realized, through this process, that there's a reason why Rosso's stuff is so good—she is painstaking in the extreme, which I don't know how she manages, given how spontaneous her work looks, but there were twice as many segments to this lesson as to any other and much of it was Rosso placing one dot of paint here or there to bring up the whole to perfection.

As I frequently do with these lessons, I sought out my own reference photo rather than using the one employed for the lesson, because I don't want to end up with a picture that looks just like everyone else's in the class. So some of the color instruction was lost because the skin tones were being mixed for a specific person, and my person had lighter and more olive tones. I did, however, find someone with a hairdo almost as fun, and with the added advantage (or challenge) of some colorful clothing instead of a simple white slip.

I painted my background yesterday and did the drawing last night; I then photographed it this morning and corrected the drawing to match the reference more closely, and about 11 a.m. I began to paint. I took a lunch break at 1:30 and went back to the portrait at 3:00, finishing up about 6:30 (although I had to give it a couple of hours to dry thoroughly before I tried to scan it). I shouldn't be sitting still for long periods like that, but hey—every once in a while you have to break the rules, even your own.

I went considerably bigger than the lesson painting, and was glad I did, because even so the little fiddly details of eyes and nostrils and ears and mouth were tough. I did the classic Rosso technique of painting my original background a kind of eggshell color and then coming in at the end with blue to make the figure pop. I like the blue with the browns of the figure and the reds of the shirt.

The only thing I'm really not happy with here is that, once again, I can't get my model to look at me. I put the eyes and pupils and highlights all in the exact place they occur in the photograph, and yet somehow she is staring out into space rather than right at the viewer as she should be, given all those constants. I just do not understand why that doesn't work sometimes, but there it is.

"Amelia"—pencil and acrylics on thin birch board, 12x16 inches. (The scan is cut down a bit from 12x16 because of the limits of my flatbed—there is more cream color around the outside of the painting than shows here.)

You can see Rosso's work @rossoartist on Instagram. Have a look.