This lovely girl is my good friend's daughter, Natalia, at our last open studio. I had so much fun doing this project because she is such a joy.... as are all the Camilo girls. Interestingly, my favorite parts of the painting are the areas that took the least amount of time to paint..... her pants, shoes, and sweater folds. They seemed to paint themselves. What a blessing it is when that happens!I seem to struggle with feature placement when I try to fill in local color as I'm "blocking in." For future portraits, I think I will try laying in the mid-tones first, then going back in with my lightest lights and darkest darks. Fortunately, there isn't only one way of doing this, I just have to figure out what works best for me. Also, I purposefully made her neck a little short to avoid cutting off her hair line. I regret that now (I don't think it would have hurt the composition).... because it seems to have made her head a bit rounder then it is in person. But as Matisse once responded to a critique of his anatomy depiction, "This isn't a woman, but a painting." Ha! Creative license is a beautiful thing.
Anyway, all in all, a successful experiment. Thank you, Natalia, for being such a sport!
This will probably be my last post for the week. I seem to be fighting a cold and have a busy weekend coming up I need to be ready for. Stay healthy everyone. It's cold out outside!
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