Stop me before I glaze again.

I got so much done yesterday, after I finally quit picking at my self portrait. As much as I love watercolor, I can see that it might be better to use acrylics or oils for portraits, so you can make substantive corrections if you have to. That is almost impossible in watercolor in most cases where you might have made an error in lining up the features or painting the eyes. I finally figured out what was bothering me about my painting. When my sister took the photo, we were kidding around and I had a livelier expression, whereas in my painting, my expression is more introspective. The watercolor seems to show my inner nature. Or am I just rationalizing? Oh, well. I hope next week I can find time to tackle my granddaughter's portrait that I used in my first portrait demo three weeks ago.

Watercolor portrait lessons

When I was ten, I learned from the Andrew Loomis book, Fun With a Pencil, that the features on a face have to be in proper proportions to look right. So last Monday for my watercolor class, I began with proportions. There is no perfect proportion, but you can generalize to begin with, then look for differences to create a likeness. I divide the head in half between the top of the skull and the chin, somewhere around the brow bone. The tip of the nose is about halfway between that line and the chin. The mouth is about 1/3 of the way between the nose and chin. Also, there are usually about 5 eye widths across the head. The inside corner of the eye lines up with the side of the nose; the pupil of the eye lines up with the corner of the mouth.

I demonstrated one style of watercolor portrait technique, which I learned from Homer O. Hacker, A.W.S. I painted the blue iris of the eye first, then used Davy's gray and cerulean blue to develop the shadows around the eye, cheeks and neck. After blocking in the planes on the head, I tinted the flesh with color glazes, yellow ochre and cadmium red with a bit of burnt sienna in deeper areas. I brightened up the flesh tones with glazes of permanent rose around the cheeks, brow, chin and tip of the nose. I painted just a little of the hair and did no refining of the features or shadows under the jaw. The demo was about 30-40 minutes.

I also showed the class how to enlarge a photo using a grid that I printed on transparent film. I made these grids in Microsoft Word using "tables" to create grids 8" x 10", 5" x 7", and 4" x 6". The squares on the grids are 1". It's very easy to enlarge your picture, as long as you use the same number of squares vertically and horizontally. I keep my grids in transparent sleeves and slip my photos inside, taking care not to let the photos shift while I'm transferring my image.

I've been wanting to do this portrait of my granddaughter, taken when she was about 3 years old. I printed an 8" x 10" photo to use with my grid. Out of curiosity, I printed two black-and-white images. One is unedited and shows the natural value patterns on her face. The other is a posterized version that breaks up the lights and darks, making it easier to see highlighted areas. It also gives a clearer picture of some of the detail in her eyes.

I placed the 8" x 10" photo into the transparent sleeve. As it turned out, my old HP printer had printed my original out a little larger than 8x10, but the cropping wasn't a problem for my composition. I blocked in my drawing on a sheet of tracing paper, enlarging the squares to 1.5 inches. I used a Prospek drawing tool, an inexpensive proportional drawing tool, to check critical dimensions, such as the width of the pupils and the placement of each eye.

This is the drawing I'll transfer to watercolor paper using a lightbox or graphite paper. (It still needs a little work around the chin.) It's close enough that I think I can capture the likeness as I paint. The photos I took this afternoon for this post are all slightly distorted, but you can get the general idea of how proportions and grids work in painting portraits. I hope this will help someone.

Not getting up to speed

I really thought I would be steaming ahead full speed by now, following the new year, but it isn't happening. Well, that isn't exactly true, since I'm going at a pretty good pace, but some things are still on the back burner--like blogging. I felt very smug that I got my 2008 records sorted and in a box, so I can attend to tax matters when the time comes. Then, I learned that a package I shipped to Washington state on Dec. 31 still hadn't arrived by Jan. 13, and I couldn't find the receipt to track the package. I spent hours looking at every piece of paper in the box and it didn't turn up. Since I had shipped a number of packages in December, I didn't recall which shipper I had used, so I called around and finally found the one that had the record. The package was on the truck to be delivered that day. But I didn't get anything else done for hours.

Then, our kitchen sink stopped up and we had to wait a couple of days for repair. Then.... Oh, rats, it just goes on...the water softener overflowed and there was a delay in service on that. And it has been bitterly cold, which is no surprise in Ohio in January, but just adds to the tension. What would I do without hot mocha?

My Hithergreen class is in full swing. The lessons on portraits have gone well. Two weeks ago I discussed the proportions of the head and features. This has been their main hangup, along with foreshortening. On Monday this week, I brought in a portrait-in-progress of my granddaughter to show them how I used a grid to enlarge the photograph. Then I started a portrait demo of a fashion model, to show them one way to do portraits--washing in the shadow planes with Davy's Gray, then glazing with flesh tones, a combination of yellow ochre and cadmium red. The final touch was a splash of permanent rose on the cheeks, forehead, tips of the nose and chin. I try not to take too much time in demonstrating, because they don't have much time to paint in a 2-hour class.

Their assignment is to do a self-portrait or caricature for next week, which should be fun. I don't plan to finish the demo, but I'm looking forward to working on my granddaughter's portrait. Time, where art thou?

Portraits vs. Caricatures

I've been thinking about the differences between portraits and caricatures and I realized that this caricature of me clearly shows the difference. It was done several years ago by Susan Moreno,one of my color workshop students who is a professional caricaturist. She took several photographs and sent the finished pastel after the workshop was over. My friends were horrified when they saw it, and I was taken aback, but when I got used to it, I realized it really does capture some of my characteristics. Compare it with a photo that was taken around the same time. She got the hair, the chin, the eyes (a little less smiling in the photo) and the nose is close. I'm not so sure about the chipmunk cheeks, but that makes the caricature funnier. The spindly neck is funny, too. And that's what I think caricature is about--exaggeration and humor. A portrait is a completely different animal. Apparently master portraitist John Singer Sargent got so tired of hearing sitters complain about small details in their portraits that he finally abandoned his lucrative practice of portrait painting, saying, "A portrait is a painting with a little something wrong about the mouth!" If you've ever done a portrait, you've no doubt heard something like that about your picture.

Portrait Commissions

A friend of mine recently had a portrait commission rejected. The person she did it for was extremely rude in calling it a "caricature." Of course, the artist was disappointed and hurt at the reaction. I seriously doubt that she will want to try to make it right. I wouldn't, under the circumstances. I have great admiration for artists who do commissions of any kind, because there is so much pressure to perform with a commission. The stress is unbelievable. It's even worse for portraits, where a likeness is expected, and rightly so. One of my instructors told us not to worry about the likeness, as long as the portrait looked human. Good advice. Unless it's a commission. This portrait of my Little Artist isn't a perfect likeness, but it captures her spirit.

I did "house portraits" for awhile early on, but I had learned a few tricks of the trade from a friend who was constantly pestered by clients who wanted this and that changed in finished paintings, even though the elements they wanted weren't in the photos they provided. First of all, get a non-refundable deposit. Then, make it clear that you're going to paint it your way, and if they don't like it, they don't have to take it (but no deposit back). Then I would do a painting I liked and show it to them. Once in awhile I would provide preliminary sketches for approval. I never had a commission turned down. I was also extremely selective about what subjects I would paint on commission. It had to be a historic home or something with character that I would enjoy painting. I deviated from that once when my sister asked me to copy a watercolor of her home that I had given her as a gift. She wanted an original for each of her three children. I got around that one by using the same drawing three times--in different seasons. I think that was the last commission I ever did and I'm not likely to do another.