I can see it, I really can! I've been neglectful of my blog entries due to an irritating bunch of domestic duties and a time crunch on completing the commissioned portrait I've got going on. Some of those domestic duties, sad to say, are going to take a little more time to finish up, but with luck *crossing fingers* the portrait will be done by tonight or tomorrow. Hoorah!
It's been rough going. The photos I'm working from are terrible for the painting process and acquiring any other reference material was basically not happenin'. I will confess, too, that I wasn't thrilled with doing this commission from the get-go and naturally
that didn't help matters. I've repeated my mantra to myself every day, "Suck it up and do the work." And every day, with the exception of this past weekend, I've been in the studio pushing paint around, trying to create a likeness of two people from a photograph in which the faces are the size of my thumbnail. The biggest problem was simply the fact that I wanted to work on other stuff ... stuff I'm not going to get paid for. But, as a professional artist, you often have to put aside what YOU want to do for the sake of running your business. This commission is a case in point.
While scanning and enlarging it in Photoshop does help, there is still an amount of blurriness and fuzzy edges you just can't get rid of. I think I'm rather proficient with Photoshop after all these years, so I did all the tricks I could think of to give myself as good material to work from as possible. There's only so much you can do when your starting point is sixty-seven steps behind bad. Lesson learned is stick to my guns and refuse to do the work if the reference material isn't good quality ... even for repeat clients, such as this commission is for.
I was really tempted to do the portrait in acrylic but the client likes my watercolor work. I do too. I love watercolor. The thing is, my tendency to be the 'blend queen' is hard to do within small spaces when using watercolors. My method of paint, blot with tissue, paint, blot with tissue, doesn't work well in a tight area where the area of blending to be done is the size of a dime, or less. I've tried tearing the tissue into small squares and rolling it into a point to blot with. Unfortunately, this still doesn't really work well for me. I tried using Q-Tips, and again, doesn't work well. I really need the face to be larger than my hand, which is what the size of these two faces are, for my accustomed blend method to work for me.
What I've resorted to doing is adjusting some of the blend areas with colored pencil. Now, this is tricky because of the slight texture of the watercolor paper. As any artist who's worked with hot press, soft press, cold press or rough press papers knows, pencil tends to skim the surface, or raised bumps, of the paper's texture, allowing little white spots of the paper's indentions to show through. Even sharpening the pencil to a needle sharp point doesn't always work. With straight graphite it's not as difficult because it can be stomped and smudged into the paper's recesses. Colored pencil, even the Albrecht Durer soft ones I use, are not really smudgable. I do have colorless blenders I employ, but again, these only work just so well, sometimes not at all.
I also have to be careful to keep the pencil work to a minimum - this is supposed to be a watercolor portrait, after all. Most clients don't remotely comprehend the theory of "you've gotta' use what works" at times. Several years ago I even had one client who was rather upset she could see marks of the initial graphite sketch and refused the portrait she'd commissioned. She was a pain-in-the-ass client anyway, and while it did piss me off, I really wasn't surprized by it. Funny side note here; That particular client was a care-giver to a mentally handicapped young woman. She had commissioned the portrait of the young woman for the parents as a gift. As I said, the client refused the painting. I left it at the frame shop where I had delivered it to and had actually forgotten about it. About a year later, maybe longer, I got a phone call from the frame shop owner asking about the portrait. Seems that the young woman's parents had come into the shop with their daughter to have something framed. The shop owner recognized the woman from the portrait and showed the painting to the parents. They loved it! And they wanted it! I told the shop owner to just let them have it, no charge. They were thrilled and I received a very nice thank you card in the mail a few days later. Goes to show you can never tell - something will be disliked by one yet totally pleasing to another.
Since I have already done work for the current client I have a reasonably good idea of what she likes and doesn't like, what she wants and doesn't want, what she'll accept and won't accept. This gives me a little comfort zone. I know that if the portrait LOOKS like her sister and brother-in-law I'm okay. On the other hand, I have to make sure I still do the best job I can ... it's just the way I work. If I can't say to myself I've done the best I could, then I'm shorting not only the client but myself as well. I don't want to do that. It's unprofessional, true, but it hurts me as an artist in a very personal way.
So, hopefully I'll be posting the finished painting here, as well as on the website, sometime in the next couple of days. For snorts and giggles I'll post the reference photo with it as well. For now, it's back to the studio and paint slinging!
Y'all have a great evening!
