Artist portraits

Before I'm done with these classes, I'm going to have quite the collection of artists' likenesses—every time I don't care for the lesson, or don't have the materials I need to complete it, I contemplate struggling to do it anyway and then decide to paint the artist instead, particularly if they are photogenic and have a good reference photo handy on their Instagram page!

Today was no exception: While I had nothing but admiration (and awe) for how Phoebe did her own version of Svitlana Prokopenko's assignment for PYHAS 2022, reproducing with gels and pastes and thickeners and who knows what other media what Svitlana painted in oils because Phoebe doesn't do oils, I had zero ambition to emulate that effort. (I don't do oils either.) I had a pre-painted acrylic background lying around that I thought would be good as a backdrop for a portrait of Svitlana, since her primary colors are delicate whites, pinks, lavenders, and reds, so I drew and then painted an artist portrait instead.

I miscalculated by painting her sweater what turned out to be a rather bilious shade of green, but I'm too lazy to change it; maybe I'll go back and make it another color, but I thought that making it red would be too strong and the lavender would be overwhelming with all the other purple in the picture. I didn't want to do it in its true color, which was a rather unprepossessing beige, because combined with the hair it would be too light and too bland; thus the green. Oh well...

"Svitlana"—pencil and acrylic paints on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.

"Don't waste paint!"

If someone asked me, What is the one thing Emma Petitt emphasizes during her lessons? my answer would have to be "Don't waste paint!" She constantly reiterates: Don't clean that brush, go back over your highlights with it again, go over your darks, and when there's hardly any paint left on the brush, scrub it over the surface to get some nice ghosting effects over the color.

I have taken her exhortation to heart to such an extent that I have had a whole line of portraits emerge from the backgrounds that I make on watercolor paper with whatever leftover paint I have on my palette at the end of a portrait session. One portrait's colors become the next portrait's background, and no two are alike, depending on what colors and in what quantity I use.

Here is yet another one, serendipity that emerged from thrift! I rolled and scrubbed the colors into a piece of paper, and then scraped with a credit card and made marks into the surface with the hind end of a paintbrush. I left it to dry, and tonight I took a look at it only to see the ghost of this young woman's head and shoulders emerging from the background. The outline and colors were so perfect that I didn't even consider applying more paint; instead, I grabbed a couple of shades of brown Conté pencils and simply defined the outlines and added a few shadows to the appropriate areas. It took about 20 minutes, and there she was!

"GirlHead"—acrylics and Conté pencil on Fluid 140-lb watercolor paper, about 8.5x10.5 inches.

Back to Emma style!

Our lesson this week is with one of my favorites, Emma Petitt! It was a pretty large and complex lesson—she encouraged us to go big, and to paint on canvas if we had it, so I did both. I decided 18x24 was just too big for my subject, so I went 16x20, but that's still considerably bigger than I've been working lately. But since the lesson was two full figures, tiny heads to giant toes, we needed the space.

I struggled a little with the canvas, especially with making the background—because it's not absorbent in the same way that watercolor paper is, the background got a little heavier and more opaque than I prefer—certainly more so than Emma advocates. But, I moved along and tried to use it to my advantage.

I found two separate photos of young women slouching on sofas and put them together. I wanted to convey the idea of them on the sofa without actually painting the sofa, and I'm not sure it came off, they're kinda floaty.

I used China marker for the drawing, per Emma's new method (she used to use charcoal), but I didn't find (as she said) that it resisted movement; it did in fact smudge some black/gray into some of my paint and I had to let parts dry and then go over them again to obscure that, since this style demands a freshness of color unpolluted by grays. I also used a Stabilo to reinforce some lines at the end and then had to do more "fixes" when I smudged that as well. This was a lot of working and re-working that took away some of the spontaneity; and I had some trouble with the hands and feet, as expected. But—I did it, and I'm mostly pleased.

I called this "Footsie" because while they are sitting and not touching, there's a little frisson of anticipation in those feet! This is a bit darker than it looks in real life—indoor photography with inadequate lighting! Thank you, @emma_petitt_art, as usual, for a fun and thorough lesson.

Strachans!

A few days back I made a watercolor of Kara Strachan Bullock, and today when I went seeking a reference photo from which to practice the "Nadyia" technique again, I decided I'd better also do Kara's artist sister, Deanna Strachan Wilson, or there would be shouts of favoritism! No, really I wanted to use her photo because she has almost completely white hair, and I thought it would have a cool unfinished look next to the full-on cross-hatch, pen, watercolor, and acrylic treatment of the face.

I didn't really intend to go so dark with my colors (she's pretty pale), but the brush pens are so intense that I had to bring other things up to match them. Also, I mistakenly picked up a green pen when I was going for a gray, so there are some interesting shades incorporated. But over all, I feel like it worked, and I had fun, once again, using the Nadyia method.

"Deanna SB"—Ohuhu and Arteza pens, watercolor, white acrylic, gel pens, Uniball pen, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.

Tachina Take Two

Not exactly Take Two—I didn't paint a do-over, I just spent another half hour slightly altering the angle and placement of the ear (which I discovered was the culprit, rather than the location) to look slightly more like the photo. Of course, in the course of doing that I took another hard look at the reference photo and discovered that the real problem lay in the angle of the entire head, which I didn't quite grasp as I drew it. But, with the ear shift and some additional tweaks of highlights and shadows here and there, I'm happier with her, to the point that I'm willing to post her on Instagram.

Here below is the reference photo, from which you can discern my remark about the tilt of the head/face. Close, but no cigar, as they say.

I still plan to try her again in watercolor, because she deserves a more accurate rendering—but maybe not for a few days!

Texture!

My friend Phoebe is a magician. She makes all these heavily textured backgrounds, and then by some sleight of hand I have not yet fathomed she draws and paints perfectly rendered portraits over them with each highlight and every eyelash placed precisely where she decides they should be, using all sorts of esoteric media, undeterred by the damned bumpy surface! Well, I'm just here to say...Can't do it!

I decided to try today, so I put a big glop of gesso on my paper and spread it around, then roughed it up with an old credit card and let it dry. Then I attempted to make (in charcoal, just like Phoebe does) my base drawing. After I made it about halfway, I gave up, rubbed out most of it, and went back in with pencil.

I tried some watercolor on the surface but found that it beaded up and I couldn't control it, so I switched to acrylic. I made a great big daub of it for a couple of hours, and finally did some fixes with a Stabilo and a gel pen and called it good. It's not good, but I'm done with it!

This, poor woman, is "Tachina." Gesso, pencil, acrylics, Stabilo, gel pen, on Fluid 140-lb. watercolor paper, 12x9 inches. Someday soon I will paint her with a big sloppy watercolor brush on some nice smooth paper and do her justice.

LFI 2022 Week 7

Hard to believe we're seven weeks into the new year already! I haven't been doing many of these LFI lessons, because a lot of them have been either in graphite or designed to learn virtually in Procreate or Artrage, neither of which appeals to me. But THIS week was a lesson I could get behind! I did have to splurge and buy some marker pens and brushes to duplicate what the teacher was doing, but the method looked so fun that I didn't mind! (I ended up buying some wrong pens, so I still had to improvise a little, but I managed a fair facsimile of what she was doing.)

The teacher was Nadyia Duff; as usual I decided to paint the teacher instead of the reference photo, and boy did I have big fun. This is a much more illustrative style than I am used to, utilizing a lot of different media, and doing a bunch of hatching and cross-hatching, which I hate in pencil but love in color! There are several layers here—first marker pens, then water-based brush pens, then watercolor and acrylic, and then we came back in and added/replaced some of the hatching that got lost under the other media, wherever we wanted things to pop. Lastly, she does these fun funky backgrounds of one-point perspective line drawing with no color that give her work such a unique look! I didn't do so well with the perspective part, but I love the effect of the full-color figure against the black-and-white background.

I'm putting in process photos, because this really was a long, involved creation.

The drawing:

The first layer of hatching:

The water brushes (I kinda panicked here, it was so dark!):

The last two layers (watercolor/acrylics, and then replacement hatching):

And, the finished piece!

"Nadyia Duff"—Ohuhu color marker pens, Arteza water-based brush pens, watercolor, acrylics, Signo white gel pen, Uniball for the black details, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress paper, 9x12 inches.