Family Portraits, or Selfie Sunday

Lou decided, after watching the celeb-paint-off-challenge portrait thingy on telly, that what she and I really needed to do was to gather up a kitchen full of art materials, and to spend the afternoon staring anxiously at ourselves in mirrors. For some incomprehensible reason, I agreed. Lou grabbed the acrylics and a table easel, I dusted off my oils and the bockety leg-sliding full-size easel, and with our propped up mirrors in precarious place we set off on what turned out to be an entire afternoon’s self-portrait painting session. 

This was the sunniest, warmest, most glorious day of the year so far, and we spent it all indoors, utterly focused in rapt concentration, staring intently at every minute detail of our reflected faces. Which is all very well when you are a smooth fresh-skinned 20 year old, not so very well when you are a teensy (ahem) bit more mature and have spent quite a number of years successfully avoiding the fact that you are ever so slightly getting older. Whoever decided that there are only 7 signs of aging clearly has no idea whatsoever.

Wrinkles aside, painting a selfie turned out to be enormously interesting and enjoyable. I had no real idea of where to start so I kind of jumped too randomly from loosely painting large flat area to laboriously fiddling with little details, but gradually a semi recognisable face appeared.  Although it is by no means an exact likeness ( I am adamantly not admitting to being that haggard and worried), neither is it a million miles from resembling the middle aged woman fixedly glowering at herself in the mirror.  

Lou was excellent; she had never painted a portrait before nor has she much experience with acrylics, but she just dove on in there. I was deadly impressed with the boldness and surety of her approach. She blocked out her whole face in big tonal shapes, and then just put in enough detail to make it right, but not fussy.  I think her portrait is wonderfully striking – and much though I’d love to grab a little bit of credit for any teaching or motherly inspiration, I can’t actually, she’s just a natural.

While Lou and I had our mini artist’s colony up and running in the kitchen, Paul was in the garage also working on a self-portrait, one of a series he has been doing lately. Is this normal? Is this how other families spend Easter Sunday? Hmm, I suspect not. This face below is as yet unfinished, I believe will have paint, an aerial, possibly candles; yup, not normal at all!

some tablets

I thought I'd better put something in my blog before it died of boredom and gave up on life. I've  not been able to paint at all, I'm studying a course in Renaissance art for a Humanities degree at the moment - it is fantastic and fascinating and I adore it to bits, but it is quite incredibly time consuming.

This is a sketch on a tablet ( Nexus 7) of Holbein's portrait of Sir Thomas More. I've convinced myself that by sketching the paintings I'm studying, I'll learn something about them. Sketching on a tablet is new to me, this is attempt no 2. I'm using a free sketching app, which is probably quite basic, but is easy enough to get the hang of. 

I thought this course would be all Florentine Madonnas and such, but we are also looking at Netherlandish art. This is a sketch of poor Mary Magdalene from Rogier van der Weyden's Deposition. 

She is contorted and distracted with grief - in the original anyway. I'm made her very grey. Okay, back to the books.