Random

This is not the painting I was planning for today! I had a particular vision and, after prepping a piece of paper with a rough coat of white gesso, I opened up my reference folder on my desktop and started clicking through photos, looking for the perfect face to work with my plan, which entailed inclusion of a chrysanthemum and some collage.

Then I came across this model, who I painted a year or so ago, and I thought to myself, Hm, she would be cool in acrylic, especially because she has some intriguing shadows and colors in her face, and suddenly there was a whole new plan.

Here is the old painting, in watercolor (or maybe it was acrylic inks?). I painted her "straight," and then decided to futz around with Stabilo to make a "halo" around her, and with an Elegant Writer for the background. I may have thrown some salt in there, too?

So far all my acrylic paintings have followed the formula I learned from Emma Pettit, which is to create a colorful background first and then paint over it, so that I start with whites and move through to darks; but with this one, I started with a white background, which involved some reverse thinking. When I finally got done with the figure, I decided that I did need a color in the background, and chose the lavender to make both the shadows and the contrasting colors pop. I was intentional about the direction of the paint, which all radiates out from her head and allowed me to use my flat brush to give a soft edge to the peach fuzz hair she has on her head; I'm not sure whether I should give it another coat, since it's kinda sketchy looking. I'll think about it and come back later.

I did a better job last time of capturing the slightly exotic tilt of her eyes—they are a little too big and round this time—but otherwise I am happier with the likeness; the nose isn't too long as it was before, and the entire head and face are in better proportion. So I guess I have learned something about facial structure, at any rate!

Here is "Bald Girl #2"—white gesso underpainting, charcoal drawing, acrylic paints, and a little bit of Stabilo here and there. 9x12 on 140-lb. coldpress Strathmore paper.

Fitting it in

Between doing annoying (but apparently necessary according to the Franchise Tax Board!) back taxes and coping with plumbing problems, I haven't been able to take the time to focus on making a painting these past few days. I split my time between searching for paperwork and plunging the kitchen sink, calling people for errant W4s, trying to understand the questions in TurboTax, boiling water to dump down the sink in the hopes it would loosen whatever was clogging things up...not conducive at all to creativity. But after yesterday's debacle with the initial plumber I contacted (he showed up three hours late and then didn't have a pipe wrench with him!), followed by seeking out a legitimate guy and getting him to come look at the problem and give me a quote, I also had to spend today waiting for him to arrive and then trying not to hover while he did the work.

I hesitated to start something at first, but then decided that I could at least lay down the base drawing and then maybe, once he arrived and started dismantling the pipes, I would have time to make the painting (also preventing me from hovering). This plan proved doable (although I did the second half of the painting after he left, he was so quick!).

I decided to go back to a "loose" watercolor style—the kind I refined through taking Fiona Di Pinto's mini lesson on Etchr—but this time with a reference photo chosen by me, and in richer tones and colors. Her pose turned out looking a bit awkward, since in the photo she is leaning forward with her forearms crossed on a table but in this format I only had room to show her shoulders and upper arms. I should have either drawn smaller or used larger paper! But I'm mostly happy with the bloominess around her features and the intensity of her gaze. Her hair was much darker than this, but I ran out of my dark sepia and had to mix ultramarine and burnt sienna to get this lighter shade of brown.

"Ella"—pencil and Paul Jackson watercolors on Strathmore 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.

Wrapping up the prompts

Today's gardening prompt from they_draw.com was "zinnias," and I just happen to have a long border of zinnias up against one wall of my yard, beginning to fade a bit but still quite colorful and full.

That particular wall has been completely obscured by my neighbor's vine—it was planted to crawl up the wall on their side about 15 years ago, and has now grown up and over to carpet my side with dense leafiness, dark in the shadows and bright where the sun strikes it at the top. I'm thrilled—apart from the look of it, which I love, it's probably the only thing still holding up that section of wall, which was installed in 1948 and has become increasingly wobbly over the years as it has survived several large earthquakes. My dad had to shore up the portion of the wall on the other side of the yard with a couple of posts after the Northridge quake, but the vine on this side kept everything standing nicely.

I was going to just pick a handful of zinnias, stick them in an attractive vase, and paint a watercolor still life; but after my experience on Tuesday with the Van Gogh immersive experience, I had the impulse to try painting a landscape with acrylics, which I have yet to do since taking them up this year. So I taped off a piece of watercolor paper and gave it a shot.

I'm actually pretty happy with it—the hedge-covered wall has a nice solidity enlivened by its highlights, and the zinnias feel authentic. The tree in my neighbor's yard that peeks over the wall was initially too prominent as a mere background, so I washed over it with a blue-white glaze to back it down, and now it feels like about the right intensity. The brown at the bottom is the color of my lawn after a mostly rainless summer, but it provides a nice space to throw in a few shadows from the overhanging bits of zinnia border.

"Zinnia Border"—Vincent it's not, but I thank him for the inspiration to try, and it makes for a big finish for the month's prompts. Acrylics on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 16x12 inches.

Tiny lesson doodles

A lot of groups are putting little mini live sessions online as part of their offerings lately, and I attended two in the past two days. I didn't do any major work as a result of them, but I did take good notes and will get back into them later.

The first was with Salli and Nate of they_draw.com, also responsible for illustratorsforhire. I joined their "Illustrators' Circle," which includes lots of draw-alongs and contests and other features. Yesterday we did a draw-along called "Abstraction Distraction—Inserting abstraction into your drawing practice." The idea is a five-step process that consists basically of thinking of an event, a place, or an experience, and making shapes that bring it back to you, in kind of a quilt-like assemblage, with an evocative color palette. Salli gave a few examples of some she had done, and I took a couple of screenshots:

  

The first is about a weekend in Miami, while the second is Salli's take on the winter solstice. You can see how the color palette in the first, and the curving and square lines, evoke the whole atmosphere of Miami, while the second has some specific references (moon, stars, trees, village) that, along with the colors, nicely reproduce the feel of the longest night.

This whole idea/process really appeals to me, and I plan to try some with color and shapes soon. All I had in front of me during the draw-along (without scrambling to drag stuff out) was my sketchbook and the Uniball I was using to take notes, so I did a doodle of my checkerboard herb garden, attempting to make basic shapes and lines that would convey plants without actually drawing stems and leaves. Here are my "Abstract Herbs."

Today's lesson was to play with line to make "curly" faces, which is to say a mostly continuous contour drawing of a face where all your lines are moving and defining the contours without lifting your pencil much, and varying the weight of the line for emphasis.

The teacher, Dina Wakley, used a Stabilo All pencil and then, since those are water-soluble, went back in with a wet brush to use the medium for shading. She also did a bunch of messy finger-painting with white acrylic paint mixed in, which appealed less to me, but I did enjoy doing the portrait and then using the wetted pencil to make the contours, and will, again, practice this more. Here is my version of a "Curly Face."
 

No impressive art made, but some interesting techniques to play with—a nice use of a morning hour in the studio!

Phillis

As part of the upcoming Let's Face It 2022, Kara Bullock Studios is providing a series of live, short how-to lessons from various artists. Today's was a portrait with Angela Kennedy. I liked the look of the methods she was using, but didn't want to use yet another old-fashioned Gibson Girl as the reference, so I decided to use the technique to make a portrait of Phillis Wheatley, enslaved person and one of the best-known poets in 19th-century America.

Phillis was seized from Senegal, West Africa, at about the age of seven and, due to her frail appearance, was spared from shipment to the Southern colonies. Instead, she was purchased by John and Susan Wheatley, a prominent Boston tailor and his wife, as a domestic. The Wheatleys soon discovered that Phillis was a precocious child, and they and their children taught her to read and write. In 1770, at about the age of 16, she wrote An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of that Celebrated Divine, and Eminent Servant of Jesus Christ, the Reverend and Learned George Whitefield, which was published in conjunction with Ebenezer Pemberton's funeral sermon for Whitefield in London in 1771, and the poem brought her international renown.

By the time she was 18, Wheatley had gathered a collection of 28 poems for which she, with the help of Mrs. Wheatley, ran advertisements for subscribers in Boston newspapers in February 1772. When the colonists were apparently unwilling to support literature by an African, she and the Wheatleys turned in frustration to London for a publisher and, in 1773, the first edition of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first volume of poetry by an African American published in modern times, was released by book publisher Archibald Bell.

Sadly, though she continued to write poetry throughout her life, her subsequent history was not a happy one. She was manumitted shortly before the death of Mrs. Wheatley and married a free black, John Peters; but both the general economy and specific hardships visited upon free blacks, who were unable to compete with whites in a stringent job market, led to a life of increasing hardship. Although she continued to write her poems and to keep up a correspondence with some of the great figures she had met in her early career, she ended sick and destitute, unable to convince anyone to publish a second volume of her poetry. She died in 1784; her poems were published two years later.

This portrait was drawn and shaded with a hard charcoal pencil, and then painted over with a coat of Daler Rowney acrylic ink in burnt umber, which was then selectively blotted and thinned out with water. After that dried a bit, I went back in with the ink and did some subtle shading of the darkest areas; after the whole was dried, I added some more charcoal, both black and white, just to make certain areas pop a little more. I'm not great with either charcoal or pencil, being too impatient to ever learn proper shading techniques when I could instead just paint the thing! But it was fun to explore it again after many years. It would have been better with a slightly softer charcoal pencil.

"Phillis"—charcoal, acrylic ink on 140-lb. Fluid coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.

Empathy

I couldn't decide what to call this one. I wanted it to convey sympathy, compassion, fellow feeling,  and finally that comes down to empathy, "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another." I painted this while thinking of my cousins Cos and Kirsten, who are really going through it right now. Some of the things they are feeling I can completely share, while others, since I haven't experienced them directly, are a little harder. I just knew I wanted to make some art to express that they are in my thoughts and my heart goes out to them.

"Empathy"—charcoal pencil, acrylic paints, and Stabilo All on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, approx. 8x11 inches.

It's surprisingly difficult to paint someone with only part of their face showing and get all the angles right. I redrew this three times, and can still see a few things I should have fixed. But I wanted the effect of someone standing back out of the center of attention, so I gave it a try.

I love portraits

Do I enjoy doing little urban sketches, or illustrating some food to go with a recipe, or painting a brochure or a map? Yeah, I do. But...these past two years of quarantine, portrait painting has taken precedence—mostly because of the classes I took and am still taking. And I have to admit that, when the portrait goes right and I do what I wanted to do, which is to capture a likeness but also express an emotion and make a connection with the face on the page, there is nothing more satisfying—and I feel like I have barely scratched the surface in two years of painting people.

I have a painting I want to make, but I'm a little afraid of it—it's more ambitious than anything I have previously undertaken, since it is a full-figure painting (or at least 3/4) rather than just head and shoulders, and includes two people. So I bought a canvas (part of what is probably making me afraid, since previous to this I have only painted on paper), and mapped out in a sketch on paper what I want to do and how, and that's as far as I've made it.

When I don't show any major new work for a few days, some of it is that when I do a portrait that takes a lot out of me (like "Strong Light" did a few days ago), it can take a few days to get out from under its spell so I can contemplate another; some of it is also that when I release tiny bits of creativity doing these October prompts every day, it's not as satisfying but it's enough to make me feel like I did something, so I don't do anything else. But yesterday I looked at a reference that had such sweetness and personality in it that I just had to paint the subject, and I had to do it as closely as possible to the manner in which she would do it. So, last night I got out my brayer and my acrylics, carefully selected my colors, and slopped them all over a piece of 12x16 paper, with scrapes and drips and runs and swashes of color mixed over the top of one another, and today I painted the portrait.

This is taken from a photo of my teacher, Emma Petitt, and uses her favorite palette of red, orangey-pink, and turquoise (I added the lavender because I love it). Her smile in the photo was so quirky and engaging, and her crinkled-up eyes expressed such joy that I needed to capture it all.

I did some process photos (I'm trying to remember to do that!). Sometimes when I look back at them, I regret some of the stuff I have covered up and wish I had left it a little more raw, but...paint and learn. Or don't paint and learn.

I think I have made her look maybe a decade younger than she is, by getting the eyes a little too big and the face a little sharper than it should be, but it's still a good likeness. More important, I feel like it captures every ounce of that expression of good will she puts out to the world.

"Emma"—charcoal pencil, acrylic paints, and Stabilo All pencils on 140-lb. Fluid coldpress watercolor paper, 12x16 inches.