About ten years ago I took a series of photos of my daughter in a white antique nightgown with a red shawl. Since then I’ve painted from these photos many times. It’s fun to see how my perceptions of the images have changed as well as the resulting paintings.
This is the first time I’ve worked on one of these images with no drawing to start with. Because of that, it was a painting about moving shapes and altering edges. At times this was frustrating, but the freedom to move things as they appeared to be right instead of holding onto a drawing was worth it.
This is the initial block in, where the placement of shapes was similar to the original photo.
I knew something was off with the visual, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Time to take it back a few notches. Swooshing the background and the foreground together gave me a better place to continue. If I can’t figure out what’s wrong, the worse thing I can do is to continue painting, adding more, in the hopes that something good will happen.
Much more developed at this point…but, something else…, that left shoulder, doubling as a white arrow with a stripe of red going through the middle, that’s it! That area is not only a boring break up of shapes, but it’s way to strong and makes it difficult to look at the face.
The finish “Girl with a Red Shawl”.