Momma Painter: The process of a painting

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 spent several days at this stage just waiting for Drake to come out.

This was fun! I loved painting that dog. He just emerged out of the back ground along with Val's hair.

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.

I decided to have Scotty smile a little more because he is a happy guy and I had a good reference shot that merged seamlessly with what I had already done. Three wasted days and rubbed off paint later I went back to my original plan.

Here he comes.... I actually had to take the painting and all my supplies and an collapsible easel to Wyoming where the painting would hang once it was finished. From this point on I painted in my Mothers front room on a drop cloth. Thanks for putting up with that mess Mom. You're great.

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.