Another Portrait Challenge

 

After a week of "hiding" I'm back to blogging. After the murder of Alex Pretti I didn't feel like writing any posts at all. I was sickened, sad, angry, mad as hell - all at the same time. I don't know how you deal with all of what is happening in our country right now; I have a hard time with it. Long walks help, talking with friends, watching German movies, escaping into books.

Thankfully Nicole's new challenge was looming just around the corner and up to then I had successfully procrastinated. No more! It was the most welcome escape.

I had decided to try my portrait painting "skills" with the help of a photo of my daughter that I took during her stay with us in June of last year.

On Gene's blog and then on Nicole's I had read about a tracing method using oil pastels and I wanted to try it out. Wow, it works like a charm!

Unfortunately I didn't take a picture what the traced face looked like. Like with the self-portrait challenge I used watercolors again. It's a medium that I don't "master" at all, but I find it so fascinating. If I don't practice it, I will never learn it. That includes painting something that is not necessarily "good" or "pretty" or whatever word you want to attribute to it. There are only two progress photos.

The ugly stage:

This was the moment that I stepped away from it. How do you eliminate those lines and rough edges? How do you control the amount of water? Practice practice practice...

Better:

Those eye lashes are for real! Look at the photo - she is so lucky to have these long and dense lashes. She never uses mascara (like her mom, she doesn't use any make up except for a lipstick every now and then) since they always look so beautiful. She got these from her dad - it was one of the first things I noticed about him when we had our first cup of coffee together (thanks HP for those coffee corners).

Finally I thought I was done. I was afraid to ruin it if I would "doctor" it more. I'm not too unhappy with it. Here it is, joining FFO.

Nicole, thank you for this new challenge. It took me several days to paint, it was frustrating and fun at the same time. I'm glad that I did it even though there was a time in between when I was tempted to throw my watercolors and brushes out the window. Good thing I didn't!