And I'm back!!!

Woohoo! Finally got my internet back!  How is everyone? I’ve missed my blog so much! Actually, the thing I missed most was access to my online banking! I kept phoning my dad to get him to check my bank account on an almost daily basis. How on earth did I manage before?

Can’t say I’ve been really busy over the past month.  I haven’t done a lot of painting, or much of anything.  I took it as an opportunity to have a well rested holiday.  Of course, I am going away for a few days this week, so I’ll be offline again.

Anyway, while I was offline I created a painting for my mum’s birthday.  I had been intending to paint an image from home, and had gathered lots of images as you may well have seen in a previous post. However, I stumbled across an old photograph of my granda and his mother, taken when he was just a toddler, so I thought it would make a perfect present.

The photo was black and white – naturally – and the light was blown out, so detail was hard to define.  I had to make some of it up as I went along. Now, I’ve never actually painted a portrait.  I don’t think I’ve ever created a full-on realistic painting either. I’m an abstract painter as you know, but I am looking to improve my painting, as well as my looking, skills.  So I took a deep breath and dived in.

Thankfully, the wonderful Don Hatfield came to my rescue!  Don very kindly sent me his teaching video, Fantasy Portraits in the Garden, which I found to be a godsend! It is two hours long and there’s a lot of information in there. When I started watching I thought I was going to struggle with it, in the sense that it was a bit over my head, but I settled into it and I really took a lot from it. I will write a detailed post on it later.

Don paints in an Impressionist style, so this was also going to be another first for me.  It was going to be a real push! However, following Don’s instruction I ploughed on.  I have included the painting in stages.

At first, I started to lay down the parameters within which to work.  I tried to work to Don’s idea of bringing colour from one part of the image into another, in order to unite the painting, so I dragged some of the blue background into the white shirt.

The next stage was about trying to bring in large blocks of colour.  At this stage I really liked how the hair on my granda looked, and the skirt on my great-granny.

Below: I worked more colour into the painting, still trying to keep it in blocks but again bringing in colour from other areas.  I tried to make sure I had blues and yellows in the shirt due to the light bouncing up from the skirt and coming in from the wall in the background. The faces were also starting to take shape as well.

I worked on, and had most of the colour down that I was looking for, so I started focussing on the detail on the faces, and this is where I started to struggle.  The eyes were too high up, and the nose on my great-granny was too short, and my granda’s face was just totally out of whack.  So I moved to working on the clothes a bit more.  I have to say, I actually love how the clothing has turned out.  I love the green jumper with the white handkerchief and cuffs and I felt that these needed no further work on them.

I worked on the faces again and again, and no matter what I did; no matter how long I left them and how many times I came back to them, I just couldn’t get them down.  I think the face of my great-granny looks pretty good as a portrait of some lady, but doesn’t look a great deal like the photograph.  My granda’s face I just couldn’t get right at all.  I was happy with the mouth and his left eye, but the right side of the face is all out, and I was terrified of destroying it, as this was the day of my mum’s birthday, so I had to surrender to it.

I took it over to my mum and she recognised it instantly as being her dad and granny, so that was a positive at least.  She loved it, which is more than I can say for myself.  I felt so disheartened that I couldn’t get it, but it was my first ever portrait, my first realistic painting and the first time I’ve tried Impressionism, so I think I’ve done not too badly considering!