No. 11 in the 52 Portraits challenge

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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 the chin should be receding. I buried myself in figuring out how to do the lights and shadows and probably got too caught up in the details of that, yet again...

And this is where I stopped. I think she just might be sufficiently different from the reference photo (you'll have to trust me on that one). It's finished, and I brought back those super fun high flow scribbles onto her dress.


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