Please please please enlarge this on your screen to see the details of my mark making. I have to thank my fellow artist Princess Rashid for teaching me the joy of mark making. It’s something some artists find scary and I think I did at first. It’s a powerful feeling though to embrace it. I think I’d have to write a whole essay to explain what the difference between mark making and painting is. Perhaps this is enough of a visual explanation. My Studio Assistant showed up today – Maybe just in time – to tell me I needed to stop soon (and pet her). I don’t think I over worked it yet. Why she couldn’t sit on the pillow in the chair to tell me that I don’t know. She must have wanted to emphasize it. Thank you assistant! See below for some of my plan for tomorrow. You’ll also see some of the bonus material from today.

Sometimes when printmaking you have too much ink on either your stamp or found object. If you don’t knock some of that ink off you will end up with a squishy mess. Keeping a piece of paper or some deli paper at hand you can lightly stamp or press some of that extra off. You’ve just performed magic! Presto! You have some collage paper. If you don’t think before you plop your paint or ink on your plate for rolling, you might also have a ton of left over paint. Don’t fret. Just perform some more magic by using that to start another piece.

I’m preparing to do some printing with found objects on the piece I shared yesterday. This is a danger ⚠️ zone! It’s so easy to go overboard. In this particular case I am keeping in mind the feeling I want in the piece. Luckily exuberance and excitement factor in.

Actually after the portrait, this feels like play. That won’t last though. Composition is the key to abstracts so I will have to slow down and think more. Maybe not in the next phase, but definitely every move after that. It’s going to be Fun too! Artists are so lucky.

It might surprise non-artists to know that one of the hardest questions for an artist to answer is “When is it Done?” I’m pretty sure all my artist friends are nodding their head at that. The mistake I make most often is to call it done too late. It is something many of us are guilty of…over working a piece. This was the place where I decided the portrait was done. It’s not overworked, but I can see some things I’d change. We do that, us artists. As hard as we try to not overwork a piece, we also are our own worst critics.

These three images show not just incremental but also infinitesimal changes. You’ll have to look very very closely in some cases to spot them.

As the painting came closer to completion, I would take a photo of it and the composite together so that I could more easily compare the two. Taking a photo for some reason helps us artists see more clearly what may be wrong. I’m not sure why, but most of my artists friends agree. I also began using my proportioner to measure individual bits on the composite and see if I had it right in the painting. I can’t tell you how many times I went back and forth, back and forth, on the nose and on the lips. With each adjustment I felt like I was getting closer to a likeness.

So let’s start with the “easy part”. I’ve learned over time there is no such thing. However, I chose the drapery. I’ve always been fairly good at drapery – since my first art lessons even. Then I bounced around a bit. It’s often disastrous if you finish one element at a time. They feed off one another and won’t look right.

Artists have developed short cuts since the beginning of time, I suspect. Sadly, I knew my drawing skills weren’t up to getting this drawn without taking up too much time. I had 9 days from the time I came up with my composite to paint the dang thing! So I printed the piece the exact size of my paper (16×16). I then used the photo to transfer the image using transfer paper. Lucky for me, I have a printer I could print that large on. I traced the spaces for shadows and highlights on the babe and the cloth. I won’t do that again. It just ended up being too much information. Despited, supposedly being the exact image recreated, I found things wrong as I went along.

Like any other tool you can use it well or poorly. For my most recent piece, it was key in being able to create a whole from separate parts. Below are several composites I worked with in an attempt to make a portrait of two of my favorite people – only one of whom was in the original photo:

This is the photo that made me decide I wanted to paint a portrait for my daughter-in-law. She took it shortly after bringing my latest grandchild home (he’s now 7).

I loved this photo instantly and knew I wanted to paint it eventually. It was the lighting and the color palette that attracted me the most. As we were coming up to Thanksgiving and Christmas would follow, I decided it was time. I should have decided I few months earlier. The problem was that even though I loved the photo, I also wanted my daughter-in-law in it. After all she had given us a most wonderful gift 7 years ago. I’ve also always been intrigued by “Madonna and Child” works of art. Maybe because I was never a mother myself.

Anyway, there was a lot of work to be done long before I put paint brush to paper. I scoured my photos for one of L (my daughter-in-law) that would fit within the picture. I started off with some other ones, but couldn’t make them work. I found one from my grandsons first Christmas with a pose that would make sense along side the original. Next up I’ll show you the composite work I did in Photoshop Elements.