Miss J's Portrait

 You may remember the story…once upon a time, a couple of months ago, my young nieces stuck their heads over the fence (they live next door) and caught me in the middle of painting a portrait of my son. 

Their father is a pro at haggling, I should have been on my guard as they went about talking me out of my two most recent paintings (a pair of underwater cityscapes with dolphins and whales and colourful corals) for the price of the canvas…. with a bonus portrait thrown in for good measure. 

A bonus portrait each, mind you. 

Never barter with kids, you just won't win. 

So this was the photo that Miss J brought me, a photo of her in her Sunday best with her Mama Bear visiting my Grandparents as a wee babe. 

I had a bit of trouble planning the background, there's a plate on the wall that came from England, it's part of our family history and has great sentimental value (I think it belonged to my Great Aunt Jessie) but it was in an awkward place and would have thrown the balance of the painting off kilter. 

Pink was the obvious colour to choose for a baby girl portrait but this baby girl is 11yo, she'll be wanting to dispose of her childhood teddies and paint her room black in a couple of years…I wanted to pick colour that would age well with her.

Fortunately I walked passed one of my older paintings of a pair of fuchsias, the moment I saw the pinkish purples again I knew I had found the perfect background for Miss J's portrait.

As any decent acrylic artist will tell you, you always start at the back of the painting and work your way forwards. In this case, background first, then clothes, then faces and finally hair.

In the past I've painted little Asian babies, Egyptian princesses, and my own kids with their olive complexions but this was one of my first experiences with Caucasian skin tones. Finding the right colours, especially for that baby soft skin, was a huge, no epic(!) trial and error-a-thon.

At this point I began to see that something wasn't quite right with Baby J's eyes. I knew something was wrong…I just couldn't tell you what I had to do to fix it. It took me two weeks (I actually painted another portrait in the meantime) to figure out that her eyes were too close together….

3mm!! They were three measly millimetres too close. 

So I set about fixing her eyes and highlighting/redefining her facial features. These eyes have so much more expression too; they seem to be smiling more than the first pair.

So that's another happy customer and I've learnt my lesson about haggling with children. Especially such precious children...honestly, who could say no to a face like that?