John 2020, 20″ x 16″, Pastel Premiere

After being able to successfully paint me, I HAD to try to paint John!  His 80th birthday is May 17th so I thought this would be a fitting gift.  I started with a graphite drawing, that was pretty bad, then moved on to the charcoal on another 16 x 20 sheet of Pastel Premiere Italian Clay.  I highly recommend this surface for portraits.  It’s got just the right color and texture. I don’t think I’d use anything else.  Can’t imagine doing an underapainting.

My first challenge was to get a photo of him. He tends to pose or smile when he knows I’m filming him.  One evening after dinner, he was sitting at the table with light coming in from windows on either side of him.  I got the Ipad and started shooting and found a picture I really liked.  No smile (or teeth, thank god) but a nice picture that reveals his kindness.  For those of you who don’t know him, he has a lovely sense of humor and has been very easy to live with during “these difficult times”.  So I wanted to capture a little of that.

I didn’t take any pictures of the painting in process as I was not happy most of the time.  I never got the drawing as good as I did on my own portrait.  And when I started applying the color, I thought it looked awful!  However, I persisted!!!  I don’t know how to accurately measure the face so I relied on observation primarily.  (I just read on the internet about the basic proportions, which would have been a help. Fortunately, everything seems to line up with what I read!)

I had the most problem with the shape of the face and the position of the mouth and chin. His face is long and thin but with a few jowls, as you can see.  I first made the nose a little too long, which then meant that the mouth was off.  I had planned not to show the picture to John until his birthday, but yesterday I was desparate and asked him to take a look. He immediately noted that the mouth wasn’t in the right place.  When I shortened the nose, it left too much distance between the nose and the mouth. I was amazed, but then I guess he DOES know his own face!

I knew I wanted to include his hand and i was concerned (and still am) that it might be too small.  I had drawn it larger but the little finger was going to be really fat!  I DO like having the hand in there, more completely painted with the suggestion of the shirt.  He as wearing a beige shirt–not my favorite color!  So I used a number of cool and warm grayed greens that I thought would work well with the reddish-orange tones in the face and hand.  Finally I took the dark blue that I had used in his eyes and applied it to the shirt as well.  I was pretty happy with this and decided to quit!

I put it on Facebook and people are now asking me if I’ll do portraits.  I’ve watched the pros like Christine Swann and Diane Rappisi do portraits and i know that they work very differently from me.  I don’t think this is my forte and I wonder if I could really paint someone I know not at all from a photograph.  It wouldn’t be the same.  While I was painting this I would suddenly study John’s nose or mouth when sitting across from him!  Hard to do that with someone who isn’t here.

But it’s been a great challenge and I won’t say that I won’t give it a try.  After all, as I told one person–it’s really all about value shapes!

I hope you are doing OK out there.  Let’s hope we get a break sometime soon and have a few months of more normal living before fall and winter and who knows what comes!  Happy painting.