Back to acrylics

I have wanted to paint for a few days now but haven't had any extra energy (or the will to sit still for so long) after running various errands and keeping some appointments. But yesterday I found a black-and-white photo online of Carson McCullers (the photo is by American photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe),  having a relaxing moment with her cigarette, and the pose appealed to me as something I could have fun with, particularly in a horizontal format. So I covered a piece of paper with a heavy layer of swirled-on gesso for texture, and this afternoon I jumped in.

She turned out a little less painterly than I had intended; I had the dickens of a time getting all the angles of the arms/shirt right, and almost lost the significant hand out of the top of the frame, but after sketching, painting over the charcoal and doing it again a couple of times, I finally got pretty close. The hand combination is vastly overworked, but also fairly accurate after a few tries. Now that I'm looking at it again, that bottom wrist needs to come up a bit, and her ear is at a weird angle. And her nose is too long. Sheesh. Maybe some adjustments are in order...

Note: I went back in later in the evening and shortened her nose, fixed the angle of her ear, and adjusted the bottom wrist. One advantage of working in acrylic! I think it's better...and it looks more like the model, too—she actually has that long space between nose and upper lip!

I did have fun remembering to carry all colors into all areas of the painting, so that there is a little of the background green in her face, while the blue of her eyes carried through to the shadows on her shirt. I added the purple shadows last, because once I was done, the face didn't look sufficiently world-weary in comparison with the one pictured in the reference photo!

"CarsonSmokes"—white gesso, charcoal, acrylic paints, navy Stabilo pencil,

on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress paper, 16x12 inches.

Same reference, different medium

I was staring at my beloved Daler Rowney acrylic inks this morning and on impulse decided to do a second portrait of Cathleen, but this time drawn in ink and painted with transparent colors.

I did an undercoating of pink, and then threw some orange and some raw sienna into it and sprayed to mix. When that dried, I drew straight onto the page with ink, which used to be an incredibly risky thing to do; but I have become increasingly sure of myself when it comes to placing lines in a face, and I did pretty well on this one. The only flaw was that I tilted her mouth up too much on the right and down on the left, so that it's not sitting quite where it should below her nose. But I didn't take that class with Deb Weiers for nothing: I obfuscated that by going back into the portrait later and doubling up my lines everywhere, making them more loose and sketchy than the first time around, so that everything has a little illusion of movement, and the slant of the lips doesn't look as critical when there are multiple lines straightening them out a bit. Ha!

After the ink dried, I went back in with the pertinent colors—white for highlights, raw sienna and burnt umber for her hair, and for her skin a judicious mix of pink, orange, purple, and a tiny bit of payne's grey for shadow, and lastly a pop of turquoise for her eyes, echoing it again in the shirt, but with other colors showing through from the underwash.

I decided to leave the sunglasses off this time, because I know the limits of my abilities, and drawing them straight onto the paper in ink was bound to be a disaster. I could have penciled them in first, but I skipped them instead, just for a change.

I'm not sure but what I prefer this one, done in about an hour and a half, to the one I spent so many hours on, with pencil, acrylics, and Stabilo. We'll see what Cathleen has to say. Although she'll probably just end up with a twofer, and she can decide for herself which to frame and hang!

"CathleenTransparent," Uniball Vision pen and Daler Rowney inks on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.

My first portrait commission

I met my friend Cathleen on Zoom for lunch last week, and was showing her some of my recent portraits. Cathleen is a pretty low-key person (she was head of the children's department at the library for many years, which means cultivating zen-like calm in the face of daily chaos), so I was quite surprised when she sent me a picture the next day and said "Can I commission you to paint a portrait of me from this photo? My mom always loved this." I said, Sure! and proceeded to overwhelm her with samples of all my different styles, from "straight" to "wonky," and watercolor, inks, acrylics? She simply said, I will leave the style up to you, but don't paint that busy blouse I'm wearing! I was grateful for that (it was busy, a paisley in multiple colors!), but I loved the pastels featured in the blouse, so I decided, since they suited her coloring as well, to use the blouse colors as the basis for the entire portrait.

She was also posed in front of bookshelves, so I asked if she wanted those in the background, but she said no, do something more generic. But, since she is a librarian, I couldn't get the books out of my head, so I did a little trick that I hoped would suggest the faint outlines of bookshelf-like structure: I taped down some narrow sections with 3/4-inch white artist's tape, rolled on the background with a brayer in four of the colors featured in the blouse I wasn't planning to paint, then took off the tape and rolled over those white areas again, so they showed, but faintly. Deciding to do this sent me in the direction of painting this portrait in acrylic, since I'd have to do something different with a completely transparent background in watercolor.

At this point I departed from the Emma-inspired process used for the underpainting, because I didn't want charcoal showing through on this, so I drew the image in pencil, then roughed in the lightest lights and graduated around the face to the darkest darks. I initially got her eyes a little too big and her nose way too narrow and had to repaint both; I made her hair too wide, and had to cover some up; and her chin was too pointy and had to round out a bit. But once I got those details squared away, I was able, I think, to get a pretty good likeness, and I outlined selectively, afterwards, with a brown Stabilo All pencil.

I picked up the pale blue of her eyes with a plain turquoise shirt, leaving some of the background to show through to give it a nice fadeout quality towards the bottom, and used the lavender from the background, mixed with a little raw sienna, for the shadows. Her peachy complexion is Titan Mars Pale (Golden paints) combined with a little Naples Yellow, some Amsterdam raw sienna, orange, and carmine...I mixed and overpainted a LOT.

The eyeglasses were the final project, with much attention given to where the highlights were landing on the glass.

"Cathleen"—acrylics, pencil, Stabilo All, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 12x16 inches. Sold!

This portrait, beginning to end, probably took me about seven hours! I think that's the longest I've ever worked on one, which directly reflects my nerves over getting it right. I sent Cathleen a photo, and her response was, "I love it! Pack it up, it's done." So I guess I did good!

Addendum to #34

My doe-eyed guy gazed out at me all day, looking more and more pathetic, until I decided tonight about 10:00 that what he needed was a lovely lady to keep him company and shore up his sensitive personality.

I repeated some of Deb's lesson, but did some of my preliminary mark-making with a soluble red pen so that the paper would have a faint pink tint here and there. I laid down acrylic inks in orange, pink, and lime green, and also used green acrylic to make the cheek smudge. She is a pale redheaded beauty, so I whitened her cheeks, forehead, nose, and shoulders with white gesso. I gave her some tissue paper eyebrows to go with his, and some purple freckles, although they were meant to be lighter and more transparent, so I added some white scribbles to brighten them a bit. She has some odd background shapes to go with his, so that they look like they are occupying the same "universe." I had big fun!

She's prettier and less wonky than he is, but that's okay—it will buck him up to have a gorgeous girl on his arm.

"Rooney"—pencil, charcoal, red pen, acrylic inks, Uniball pen, collage, white and black gesso, white gel pen, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.

LFI #34

 This week was an unexpected treat—Deb Weiers was our teacher, so I got to go back in time to the beginning of my portrait journey, when I signed up for Wonky Friends and Critters in August of 2019, the class that led me to branch out both abstractly and color-wise and start to find my own style(s).

Rather than do my own thing, I went cheerfully back to basics, making pencil and charcoal marks on the page, running an eraser through them, throwing on some water and Daler Rowney inks to make a background, then running the other end of a paintbrush through the wet paint to make more pattern.

Then we added some acrylic paint, took some off again with random water drops, swooshed it around with a credit card, and started the image making.

Deb loves collage, and saves old drawings, from which she makes prints and cuts out features to add in, so she started out gluing on a collage eye. I don't have a printer and didn't want to cut up an original (mostly because everything is painted on heavy watercolor paper and would stick up too much from the surface), so that's where we first diverged.

Then she showed us her so-called reference photo (I say "so-called" because her stuff never actually looks like the person, it's just taking-off point), and that sent me off on a different trajectory. I loved the slightly surprised, doe-eyed look of this guy (I think she got him from a photo gallery of convicts!) and decided that my piece would be a somewhat faithful portrait. I did collage his eyebrows with some fun striped tissue paper, and also collaged some commentary on his nose. I also skipped his tiny, thin-lipped mouth for Deb's scrubbed-on one (you drop some red acrylic and then swipe across it with a credit card to see what you get), but over all, I think I still caught a likeness. Do you think his mother would recognize him?

Deb always shades with India ink, but I never have gotten the hang of how to do it fast enough not to leave hard lines, so I subbed in some Daler Rowney Payne's Grey instead—I think it gives him a softer look.

Here he is:

"Sensitive"—Pencil, charcoal, Daler Rowney acrylic inks, white and black gesso, Uniball pen, white gel pen, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress paper, 9x12 inches.

What fun it was to return to this expressive style—thanks for the lesson, Deb!

By the way, here's Deb's result—she IS the mistress of fun and funky ornamentation!

© 2021 DEB WEIERS

LFI #33

Our lesson this week was from the sweet and soulful artist Meg Yates, who always invests her breath, imagination, and sometimes a quality of spirituality or nature (or both) in her art. She took separate elements of a girl with a candle, a full moon, and an owl, and put them together in one composition, painting them wet on wet in thinned-out acrylic paints.

I liked the idea, but I didn't care much for the reference photos. The way the owl loomed over the girl's shoulder felt ominous to me, and I wasn't wild about the candle element either. So I went online looking for pictures of girls/women in which they have some relationship to a bird—my preferences were to either stick with the owl, or find one with a raven or crow. I found a lot of material, but I felt that the one I chose echoed somewhat the layout and feeling of Meg's original, although the woman is cradling the owl like a friend or companion, rather than it serving as a spirit animal. It's more of a Maid Marian vibe.

I didn't see any point in using acrylics and then thinning them out to act like watercolors; why not just paint in watercolor? But for this one I chose a third option, which was to go back to my Daler Rowney acrylic inks, which I love for their liquidity as well as the intensity of their colors.

I put a wash on the sheet first and dripped on a couple colors of green as well as some raw sienna and some "red earth" color. After that dried, I drew my images in pencil and painted them, but only selectively—I wanted the background "nature" colors to show through, particularly on the girl's skin and clothing. I almost left the original background, but it was all too much of one value, so I painted over it with a thin watery layer of Payne's Grey ink, and I think the dark punches up the figures nicely.

I'm not quite thrilled with her one hand, but it's not horrible, so I'm going with it. The fingers in the picture were a little more bent to wrap around the back of the owl. I wish I had worked smaller and left a tiny border around the outside for framing, but oh well.

"La Chouette"—pencil, Daler Rowney acrylic inks, Unibal pen, white Signo gel pen, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.

A Fluid Figure Exercise

Today's exercise draws on Emma Pettit's Fluid Figures class, but the model isn't the usual pretty girl: This is Little Head Fred, Emma's dog. She posted a photo of him, remarking that he was doing his impression of a kangaroo with his crazy long back legs, and I immediately remarked that he looked like one of Emma's exercises in extreme perspective, where the model's head is tiny and the rest of the body parts come out at the viewer until all you can see is two big feet at the "front" (bottom) of the picture. So I decided to use Fred as my model and make a little surprise for Emma.

I have to remember NOT to do any re-outlining with the Stabilo until I am absolutely sure I'm done painting in the background—as I put in the pillows, I kept nicking the outline of the dog and pulling a bunch of black streakies out into my paint. But otherwise, this one went pretty smoothly. I used fairly accurate colors for Fred, but tried to be painterly, and made the background colorful, as we do for these paintings.

I hope Emma likes him.

"Little Head Fred"—acrylics, charcoal, Stabilo, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.