I decided to paint my friend Anna because whilst I was in a really calm state of mind and was in the mood to paint I wanted to paint an emotion that reflects on this. I took a photo of Anna and painted straight away. This time instead of the using the grid method which takes to much preporation I painted straight onto the canvas without having an outline on. I started painting the nose then built different tones around it. I didn’t have any serious problems with the piece, some proportions were incorrect but I resolved this in the later stage. To our left, the eye and the cheek area show quite alot of smooth detail. I found this strange because the way i usually paint is, I use my finger to blend colours together rather than using a paint brush to blend tones together completely. So there is alot of traces and I think the paint communicates my different emotions I felt throughout the process. On the right hand side of the painting my attitude changed to feeling tired, and then being impatient. The skin tone looks less smooth to me and at that point I started to use my finger and started applying more colour to certain areas, more where the green tones are on the shadow areas.
I wanted to make the portrait based on realism/photorealsim i felt I achieved this originally the background was suppose to have a block colour representing the emotion that she is feeling. As I painted it on straight away the head was painted bigger than I originally intented, so not much background was exposed. i then thought as I am painting it realism it is obvious what the emotion is so I felt a black colour was not needed, so I painted a bluey-grey colour to compliment her skin tone and her hair colour.
There was a portrait in the National Portrait Gallery that i was a big influence to this portrait in particular. I saw it about three years ago but cannot find out who painted it. It was a chest hieght portrait of a black man with a flourescent pink background. I need to think more about scale now and other ways I could paint differently. Little details are to be added onto her fringe but for now going to work on something different whilst ideas are fresh on my mind.
