In my years of aspiring to be a children’s book illustrator, my “specialty” was emotive animals, like this terrified ant about to get scooped up by a hungry anteater:

So with my new dream of being an Etsy artist (no fine art aspirations for me!) I thought I’d see if I could create some original drawings that I would then attempt to recreate in actual paint.

What a pleasure to go back to digital after struggling with this new medium! And rather than worry about my finished product looking too “computer-y,” I could use my tools to figure out composition, expression, and color, and then give it the human touch in oils. This would also have the benefit of being reproducible, because I could grid it to create a template. I can almost smell the money!

So, my first step was creating a picture of a pigeon in a hat. It’s rough, but I like her haughty expression and the rich purples and greens. I’m calling it “Well, I never!”:

One thing I’d learned way back at the start of this blog was how to transfer an image onto canvas using a grid. In fact, I wrote a whole post about it. So I used Photoshop’s ruler with some guides, and marked the image on my screen into 6 1-inch squares, and then did the same on my canvas.

This method did indeed allow me to get (most of) the positioning correct, but it was time-consuming, and—frankly—pretty frickin boring, even for a tiny image. Moreover, I was once again tripped up by the actual painting, because in attempting to add detail in paint, everything got muddled again:

Clearly, I need professional advice! So I hopped over to one of my favorite cheap resources, Domestika, and watched the section on Portrait Painting with Oil that was part of this specialization series.

And I realized something — probably something obvious to anyone who’s been painting more than a week. I’d always heard that  with alla prima, you were blending paint right on the canvas. But in the video, the artist mixed her paints for each section ahead of time. Sure, there was some blending on the canvas, and some in-between tones that she mixed up on the fly. But she wasn’t just getting close enough and then attempting to correct it on the canvas like I was. Instead, she was being planful — putting down all of her darkest tones (one stroke at a time), and then moving down the line until she’d finished every stroke of the subject’s skin. 

Worth a try! So, I started again — this time following the advice of my bestie Gemini and using Saral graphite transfer paper to first draw my pigeon on paper before transferring it to canvas:

Unfortunately, I did two things very wrong here. One — I attempted to avoid drudgery by free-drawing rather than gridding, which led to her having way too small a head and too big a background, and just being a bit “off” in her expression and physicality. Then, I thought it made sense for me to understand where all of my value changes were, so I added those lines right into my drawing, just like a paint-by-numbers. Yikes! Line overload! I ended up losing my way in them and having to once again edit on the canvas — though thankfully not as much as before.

But, but! I still think this represents a big leap forward for me. I’m sure I’ll cringe when I look back at this in a few months, but right now I’m feeling pretty proud!