This is a photo of a commissioned piece. I took several pictures of this little girl and did two different sketches for the family to choose from for the final painting. They decided to have me paint both compositions.
I took this photo before this painting was finished and neglected to take one of the final. She ended up having flowers on her shirt and there were other changes as well. They were both framed with great frames from Many's.
This is a painting that I did for fun of my youngest daughter Starlee. I had just finished a commission and had decided to do one for me. To loosen up a bit and have fun again. I had "In the Studio with Dan Gerhartz" going in the background when I started this. I told everyone that I had been painting with my buddy Dan. No one got it but me. I was also pouring over Susan Lyon's new book "Visions and Voyages" at this time and tried some new things. I loosened up a lot and really put the paint on. Scott Burdick's work was rolling in a slide show at this time as well. I guess I'm starved to be working with other artists. I learned a lot in this painting and it is now one of my favorites.
The morning after I started this painting I found my youngest daughter, Starlee, sitting on a little step stool in front of it and she said "I just love this painting." Too cute. I need to take a picture of her admiring her.
This is the first day of painting. It took quite a while to get to this point. First I took pictures, lots and lots of pictures. Then I edited them in Photoshop to come up with a few good compositions. From there I actually did two sketches for my clients to choose from. One was vertical and the other horizontal. They obviously chose the horizontal and wanted to change Kurk's head position. I like to have all the problems in positioning and likenesses hashed out before I go to paint. This is one of my favorite parts of the painting. I do a color wash and then wipe out, with a rag and thinner, the lightest areas and make sure I have the positioning of everyone down. I have a finished size, black and white printout of my image as well as the reference sketches hanging right beside my easel while I work.
I've started to really paint now. I just begin with the center most person and work out from there. I like to paint wet on wet so I try to resolve an area before moving on. This painting was several weeks in process. I am a busy mother of three too.
There was so much skin going on here that I spent a whole day on the legs. I also used my digital camera as a refining tool in this painting. I always look at the piece with a mirror and flip it but I discovered that my camera can isolate drawing issues as well.
It's interesting to see how many changes there are from my first block in.
I'm moving left! I always seem to do this.
I didn't change much on the left side of the painting after this point. The clients wanted the mom's nose changed and few other things but this side was pretty much resolved for me at this point.
The family saw the painting at this stage and the mom cried. That's a good thing...
I signed the painting at this point. I thought it was done. We had the final viewing and I got out some scratch paper to write down the little changes that the clients wanted made. They sat and watched while I made the changes.
