Here is a portrait of my grand-nephew Les, younger brother of Ceci, whose portrait was featured in a prior post. You’ll see that he, like Ceci, was captured with bright sunlight flooding over his head and spilling down onto his eyebrows, nose and cheeks. These are unusual poses, but were great fun to paint. Sweet sweet children. In the meantime, another baby brother has joined the family. Once he gets a bit older, his portrait will be painted as well.
Les. Oil on Linen.
One of my nieces and her husband asked me to paint portraits of their two children. Being a big chicken, I procrastinated for quite awhile. Finally I dived in. Here is the final of their daughter Ceci. Here are some some of the steps along the way, if you’re interested.
You may recognize these two gentlemen from an earlier post. I was delighted that Danni recruited them to model. They were positioned so I could see each by glancing to the right or the left. Not knowing if I’d have a chance to paint them again, I decided to do both, if possible. I set up two canvases side by side and got to work. At some point I had to pick one to bring to greater finish — the bearded soldier.
Danni upped the anty with her next assignment: paint striped fabric so that the stripes drape properly with the twists and folds of the material, with shadows etc.
I didn’t want to be boring with two simple pieces of material. So I composed a still life with a red and white striped towel, topped by a bottle of red wine, standing next to a bottle of sparkling water, atop a green and white striped towel. I thought of it as a ‘Face Off’.
If you’re going to paint a portrait, you need to know how to paint clothes and drapes.
Hence the homework assignment to paint two pieces of fabric so that a viewer would know that they differ in weight and texture. I didn’t have to look far for subjects: a blue denim apron friends had brought back from Sennelier in Paris and a red satin shopping bag made by a daughter-in-law. I draped them over a corner of my easel and set to work. Voila.
I’m WAY behind in reporting on my art activities. I am hoping to give some brief updates to get back on track.
After seeing Danni Dawson’s work at the Art League’s conference mentioned in the last post, I enrolled to study portraiture with her over in Alexandria, VA.
Our first model was a lovely young woman draped in a Spanish lace mantilla. I made a series of studies of her — and they went downhill from the first one! See for yourself:
The model:
My studies:
First Attempt
Second try
Third – Aargh!
Fourth Try
For someone interested in learning more about figurative & portrait painting, there are few places better than the Art League of Alexandria, aka the Torpedo Factory Art Center. My art buddy Helen Gallagher and I enjoyed hanging out at its first conference, celebrating a milestone anniversary. Here are a few of the pieces we saw demonstrated at the event.
Shortly after dear Alison Neustrom passed away, my sister Cecilia and I flew to Maine for a mixed media workshop, turning to art to help manage grief. We wanted to try our hands at combining oil paint with patterned papers to produce unique images, with artist Katie Wilson. Ceci’s first effort was a portrait of granddaughter Evie; I worked on a biking scene of grandson Max steering dad Sam.
Ceci’s Evie
Max Steers Sam on a Sunday Ride
When last I posted in Oct 2014, I was closing in on the finale of my portrait of neighbor Rita – debating whether to make a few more tweaks despite her preference that I ‘stop right there’. I couldn’t resist, though. Here’s how she looks now, but don’t tell her that I’m tempted to start re-tweaking eight months later. Need to shorten her chin & widen her lower jaw line just a smidge.
I had made good progress during my work based on the reference photograph, but I decided it wasn’t good enough. As a way to visualize changes that might improve the painting, I decided to do a mark-up on the iPad, using a side-by-side comparison with the reference photo.
markup of painted portrait, as a result of side-by-side comparison with photo. iPad screenshot.
I cropped the photo included in my September 8th post and imported it digitally into the ArtRage app on my iPad. I then ‘painted’ over the portrait area, trying to remedy the problems I identified in the painting. This was a freehand process, done by ‘eyeballing’ the photo reference. ArtRage is not able to make measurements for a closer comparison of the two images.
I like this markup as well as the final painting — if not more! The ability to easily edit iPad marks liberates me from feeling that each (potentially incorrect) modification is ‘permanent’. Playing around with the marks often yields spontaneous and interesting ideas that I would never have attempted initially in oils.
Even though I liked the resulting mark-up, I knew it would still be a challenge to implement these ideas in oil paint on the actual painting.