Painting Lia's Portrait

This painting is based on a photo of Lia taken at a wedding about four years ago. It shows the smiley character of my granddaughter who looks beautiful in her party dress. I just love the sense of fun that exudes from her happy smiling face.

I planned to paint this picture over a year ago, so I have had plenty of time to think about it.

I decided to use water colour paints but opted to use smooth paper rather than water colour paper. I drew the outline of picture and used masking fluid on the high visibility white areas in the eyes, lips  and teeth.

Next, I worked  on the background. I used Prussian blue on the bottom left and allowed yellow ochre to mix with the top section in a wet on wet pattern. I used cadmium orange on the top right and a green made of Prussian blue and yellow ochre on the bottom left. I added a couple of background details from the photo and added a pale pink wash to Lia's face neck and arms.

Then I worked on the tone of the skin with additional brush stokes in the darker areas. I used a small round brush and a rigger brush for the hair. The eyes were coloured with Prussian blue and the centre with indigo blue.

I felt that the portrait could be improved by catching more of Lia's essential joy. I decided to paint the portrait again, but this time I used water colour paper and more masking fluid, to depict Lia's fine hair. I decided to make the background more dramatic and leave out the details from the photo. I allowed more wet in wet mixture  of the background colours and used salt on the left side to produce the starburst effect.

One of the  wonderful characteristics of water colour is that each time you paint the same subject you get a different picture. You have to learn to live with the fact that you are not completely in control of the pigments. This is the final picture, incorporating the changes I made.

Drawing

I bought some willow charcoal recently and I've been experiementing. I love the texture you can get and the tones that can be made by smudging.

Here's a good tip - Tesco value Hairspray is a cheap fixative and it works well.

Zoe thinks that I have made her a bit scary in this one. It's all to do with proportions. In my life drawing classes, I am finding out  that I tend to draw on the big side. The rather slim male model who we used at the class on Monday turned out to big and muscular in my non-representational drawing. I had not checked enough comparisons between head, neck and torso when drawing, which was why he got to be so big. It all come s down to practice, practice... practice.

Just Back

‘Is it’- I ask myself – ‘a good thing to do lots of different things?’ To find the answer I could look at the sorts of things I have been doing recently. Yesterday, I went to Stirling and attended a networking conference on Telecare – not too bad a thing to do especially as Telecare is quite interesting and I spoke to people from around Scotland, including a woman from Orkney, who brought me up to date with some of the things that happen there. She thinks that the way they are using the ‘oil money’ is much more sensible than the way they use it in Shetland. There may be a bit of Northern Isle rivalry in this. When I got home, I went to the running club and had my first injury free run for six weeks. We did a session in the soft, water soaked park, which was good for my legs…. Good thing.
After that it was the usual trip to the Tyneside free sandwiches and pizza and to introduce Harvey to runners… well he has to learn about life’s odd ball’s some time! Another Good thing
I have spent most of today in various meetings at work. Not a good thing, then I took Harvey around to dad’s old folks home, where he was a hit with all the old ladies and gentlemen… Good thing.
So there are a lot more good things than not good things in the list and I guess that if I went through my daily activities I would have a lot of good things to note down and the bad things would be around activities that I’m not keen on doing, like going to meetings for example. Another example of a bad thing is going to Tesco’s at any time, but particularly on a Saturday lunch time, which I did last Saturday.

Harvey Update: He is doing amazingly well in his new surroundings. He is very sociable and gets on with people and other dogs. He likes a lot of attention. I am teaching him to sit and stay. He has been good at learning these instructions, but I suspect that his concentration will go if there is something interesting happening, such as another dog appearing on the scene. For that reason I haven’t let him off the lead when we are out walking. I’ll hold on for a while longer before I do that. I have let him off when we get out of the car and up to now he has run to the front door or stayed by my side, so that’s a good sign.



p.s. Lia and Harvey get on together… another good thing.