Leanne Shawler, Artist

The inspiration for this piece is a class that Ivy Newport taught in Let's Face It 2017 . She very generously gave her newsletter subscribers access to it. In the lesson, she encouraged us to follow our emotions and whatever supplies we wanted to reach for. I started with the same reference photo, a Lyra pencil and my non-dominant hand. I loved doing that .... then I went into the face with Golden heavy body Smalt Hue and some Golden fluid acrylic Titanium White. Funnest part of all, was grabbing Golden High Flow Quinacridone Nickel Azo gold and giving her curls. I should have stopped there, even though it was still super sketchy and rough. And I wish I had taken a photo of that, darn it. But nope, I kept going: teal (mixed with a little wet quin nickel azo gold), raw sienna, payne's grey (because the darks needed to be darker) and then Liquitex Yellow Medium (cadmium free) because I wanted to bring light. I had to redo the chin because her head is tilted down and so ...

Now that the recipient has received her gift, I can reveal the final painting. Aside from the fact that I left my wet palette opened from Thursday morning, through Friday night, thankfully after I had pretty much finished the face so the paint that did try it didn't matter so much, this went pretty well. Oh my gosh, I used to take so many in process photos... Ugly first layers I am also deeply thankful for the Facebook group "52 Portraits in 52 Week s" as they came to my aid as I struggled to work on the shirt. The reference photo had a striped shirt that seemed really complicated.   The final piece is 12" x 16" on cold press watercolor paper in acrylic. And is my dad, who passed away last year.