I fancy myself a Linux aficionado. I also like The Gimp. Lemme set something straight – The Gimp is like Photoshop but doesn’t seek to replace Photoshop.

Lemme set something else straight: I used The Gimp in a graphic design class that required Photoshop. And I got an A in the class and the instructor (and everyone else) was none the wiser.

Now that I got that out of the way, I have to say that about 9 months ago I discovered that The Gimp had brushes, and that was the way to do the best stuff. Forget importing images and tweaking them – brushes have it down pat! So I messed around and my first image was a halloween drink menu for my wife (she’s a private bartender when she’s not in nursing school).

I got a new laptop at work so I had to reinstall my apps… along with The Gimp, obviously… so here’s what I did today after grabbing all the new brushes I wanted.

I’ve been eager to paint again but my time has been consumed with my main job at a Fortune 100 company, with my side job working for my mother-in-law, with my side job as the CIO of a startup with my Navy buddies, and, finally, as a painter. I’m pretty fucking busy, to say the least, but what I really want to do out of all this is to make art. So today was slow at work… and I used the time to do this. Not a total waste of time, mind you, because I use The Gimp all the time to whip out a quick graphic (logo, banner, icon, etc.) at work, so I do need The Gimp up and running well so I’m ready when called on, but the image started as I was playing with my new brushes and sorta blossomed from there. You artist types know what I’m talkin’ about. Dig.

So to counteract that, I’m doing some drawing basics – copying Loomis drawings using his technique. Not my favorite technique, but a good technique nonetheless. And good to put charcoal to paper again. I’m dating them so I can see the progression (if I do this more than a few days in a row).

But I’m really no good at copying drawings that aren’t real people. I’m flat-out terrible, in fact. I’d love to get the Bargue book – but it’s a cool hundred bucks. Not in the cards for the time being.

So, in the mean time, I’m still here, I’m still drawing, trying to make it every single day, even though that ends up being 10pm or later. If you want it badly enough, you’ll endure. Or you’ll delay by doing anything but what you should be doing because your last painting was successful. And that sucks.

Phew!

This portrait is of Rajashree Raghavendra, and is for the Different Strokes for Different Folks (DSFDF) painting challenge blog that Karin Jurick hosts. It’s a lot of fun and very challenging and, for me, can be pretty stressful. She painted me.

By the way, I should say that, yes, I am available for commissions if you so happen to see this painting and think you’d like to have one done for you or a loved one. Or a despised one; makes no diff to me.

I was going to take a bunch of pictures as I went through the process but I got sucked into the painting and next thing you know, it’s 10:40pm and the wife is headin’ off to bed and I’ve still got at least an hour of work to do.

Here’s the reference photo and my painting. Please note that I tweaked the ref photo for brightness and contrast and saturation a bit. It was dark when I got it. Also note that my painting was photographed in my kitchen under fluorescent lights (it is just about midnight so I’ll have to get the full sunlit painting tomorrow, hoping the weather permits) so it’s not really representative of the work (it’s brighter than this). Edit: got a picture outside – it’s overcast but the colors are definitely coser to reality. Not exactly, but pretty close.

Okay, okay, enough blathering, here’s the process for this painting:

• Started with drawing in graphite pencil, made it permanent with fixative
• Came in with the gray background and outlined the face and laid in the major landmarks
• Came in with darkest darks (always scary at this point!)
• tried mixing up the darkest flesh tones – took me probably 5 puddles of paint before I got color/value I liked
• laid in the dark flesh tones, followed by the mids, and came back through with the lights (bright yellow, not pure white)
• Worried over the mouth. I ended up getting it pretty good. Note: I don’t paint teeth. I paint a grayish yellow area with a darker shadow and a black line at the top
• Freaked out over the eyes, so I blobbed some black outlines, black pupils, and dark gray “whites” to set it in. Left it at that for a while
• Came back through to get the reflected lights. Could have done better on the nose but the paint wasn’t agreeing with me. I need better brushes.
• Scarf/hair laid in
• Used a palette knife (the sharp edge) to scratch in some gray hairs. Sorry, Raja, but they’re there so I put ‘em in!
• Re-did the glasses shadow like 4 times. It’s a purplish pink flesh tone and was hard to get. I ended up adding some Burnt Sienna to get it to look right in the painting
• Worked on the eyes like a freak
• Decided to go with an “unfinished” look. I like that look. Also wanted to include some blue in the shirt for unity (there’s blue in the hair and a touch of green in some of the flesh to “gray” out the red)
• The part in the hair gave me some trouble but I think I nailed it
• Finished the eyes. Again.
• Came through with some highlights and a smaller brush
• More eye work
• Used the palette knife to suggest glasses rims – a black line and a gray line, top and bottom
• MORE eye work – reworked most of the eyes and liked them better
• Reworked the neck to make it darker and to add the single brush stroke for the entire lit side (I like when I can get something done in a single stroke… of course, it took like 8 strokes before that one to get the right color/tone)
• Finishing touches, ensuring I didn’t miss anything
• Finished up eyes with highlights on lower lids and “alive” highlight on pupil
• Put the earrings in (they’re grey, believe it or not)
• Done!

Some notes: I realize that I’ve never done an Asian portrait before. I made this girl look caucasian. She’s Indian (East Indian, not Native American).

Her glasses are crooked or her eyes aren’t on an even plane. I’m not sure which. I’ll have to measure a few more times to be sure what it is. Also, her mouth has a grin/smile thing going on that I didn’t capture here that well. And her neck is darker than what I have. My stump did more erasing than blending. And I need to get the direction of the head correct – she sort of looks like her head is turned a bit but sort of doesn’t look like it. Her nose is off-center if her head isn’t turned. I might take a creative license here and do it how I think it looks best. It isn’t, after all, a commissioned portrait – and Karin Jurick (it’s her site!) said to have fun with it. Well. Um. Fun, here I come!

But I did get to do a charcoal on toned paper with both black and white charcoal. Which I’ve never actually done before. And I really like the effect – it gives a realistic glow to the image.

I’m going to take my study and overlay it to the original image in The GIMP (Photoshop alternative for Linux) and see where I went wrong. I did do this while watching about 4 episodes of The Office. It took me about an hour and that hour went by really quickly. So it goes.

I took this picture of a really tall stop sign. I got right up underneath it and took a strong-angled pic of it.

I continue to learn. On this painting, I learned that stop signs aren’t really red at all. I didn’t believe myself at first, so I used the eyedropper tool in The GIMP (free, Photoshop-like app for Linux) and picked the colors. This stop sign is burnt sienna and pink, actually. My instinct was to reach for the cad red medium, but there’s no cad red medium in this sign.

I learned to trust myself with direct color-on-color, wet-on-wet painting with much of this painting. The pole came out beautifully, in fact, and it was done with only a few strokes of strong color.

I learned that the outer edges of the sign, the white border, is really, really hard to paint. And it’s not white, either – it’s light pink at the top and grayish pink at the bottom.

I learned how to apply a really, really thin line at the edge of the sign. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to do it, but I pulled it off and I’m proud of myself for it.

I didn’t do a drawing for this. I had the picture turned 180 degrees and I painted it that way, too. I’ve done the “upside-down drawings” bit before so this isn’t new to me. This is just a study so I figured I’d keep it loose and go with it, flaws and all.

Speaking of flaws, I learned that I should do lettering right-side-up. The lettering is positively awful in this piece but, again, it’s a study and I learned a lot there, too. I learned how to remove paint for the letters after the fact and I figured out a good way to get the paint on there without making a mess by dragging the existing paint around and muddying things up.

Above all, though, I love the way the bolts came out. Simple, easy, effective.

I set myself free on this painting and I’m happy with this study. I am going to do an 11″ x 14″ version of this painting at some point in the future and I think I’ve learned quite a bit by doing a study on it. I’ve never done a painted study for a painting before. Lemme tell ya, it’s valuable.

Ciao.

Eventually, you do an exercise in an art class or workshop where you paint an emotion. That’s not really what I did here. This painting is how I see “frustration” and how I experience it, though I didn’t quite know until I painted it.

It was not an exercise in frustration. It was quite enjoyable to paint.

Some cool things about this painting:

• it is entirely done in cyan, magenta, yellow, and white
• the background is magenta (rose) with a little dab of cyan (cobalt blue)
  • To make the white lines pop, I added the slightest touch of yellow, careful not to overdo it
• the boxes were done with a palette knife (very thickly)
• there are some subtle details not visible in the photo
• the boxes represent a massive frustration that I can’t shake

Now that I’ve painted it, hopefully it will leave me alone and let me move on to other paintings, stop occupying that little space that is set on “ad infinitum” and I can’t, for the life of me, figure out where the switch or dial is to change it up.

But it’s okay now. I think.

How does this painting make you feel?