Emora's portrait unveiled

My cousin- Mike Koops told me to try this process for Emora's portrait.  He teachers art- so it was pretty awesome to get some actual guidance because I have been stimied with how to paint skin- which apparently is the hardest thing in portrait painting since skin is translucent.  Also, I've discovered that faces are crazy expressive.  At one point, I had a nostril off by a millimeter and it made her whole face look skewed! So it seems I started drawing her in the spring of 2012, after taking her pic. in 2011 (I do 2 year old pictures of each of my kids).  So it took me over a year to get up the courage to start it!

There were massive problems at this point as my graph was off.  I finally erased all her face and scanned her picture, recalculated and got the graph accurate.  It was very frustrating.

Basically, the process is doing the photo 3 times with what is called an underpainting.  I drew it in detail.  Then sprayed this with "workable fixatif".  I then painted a watercolor over it, adding layers for the darks and gradations of darks.  (I think I forgot to take a picture of that).

Coming along slowly even as my baby is growing older!

Finally to the color stage!  Normally, I was just putting on a sketch, then painting and the painting took FOREVER!  Probably easily 20-40 hours because I'm super slow.  But with the under painting there, I did it in 2 days- about half the hours and lots more fun!  Although I lost her face at one point and nearly called Mike in a panic to come rescue it!  I still have so much to learn, especially with the skin, but HA- I'm out of kids!! heehee 

What a journey!

Next up is to paint her room.

That'll be a lot easier and way more forgiving.

Here are my trio of portraits.  It's so nice to have Emora's up.  It always felt a bit bad to have the other two and some random kid artwork in the third spot!  Each pic was taken in their birth season.  I have a babe for 3 of the 4 seasons.  Ivan is fall, Dominique- summer and Emora-winter.  I guess it's good that she turned 2 in Canada so that it would actually look like winter in her pic!

And here are the real models with their pics.  I think it's awesome how they are showing their personalities here too.  Ivan is pensive, Dominique the smiling poser and Emora being funny.