I finished the image portion for “The Woman At The Well” tonight! Woo-Hoo! I LIKE HER! I dread, however, doing all that lettering at the bottom… I have included two shots here: one showing the incomplete water pot, just to show the work in progress, and the finished image. I may “tweak” it some more tomorrow, after I sleep, but right now I doubt it. I’d love some feedback!
I’m so excited! I got the background fixed to my liking; “The Woman At The Well” has a face; I love her hair; her skin looks like a real person’s skin; and I gave her a scarlet head cover! I have not painted a portrait face for over 30 years, and I never could get a good skin tone–always looked like a cadaver…but this worked! Oh my goodness, I’ll never sleep tonight! Can’t wait to get back to it tomorrow! Thank You, Father! It’s all for You, so You guided my hand!
Well, I had company for seven days last week. My sister was here for a visit, and it seemed we were constantly doing something or going somewhere! We had a great time, and we took her back to her home an hour’s drive away this past Sunday afternoon. Here it is Tuesday, and I have restored the house to order, but I still feel exhausted! It is time, however, to go back to work…
I started coloring in the background on the 24th July, and it didn’t meet my expectations. I worked on it some more on the 25th, but it still didn’t suit so I didn’t post a photo. You know how you can think about something so much you can become totally overwhelmed by it? Well, that’s the background situation with “The Woman At The Well”…so I needed to take a little time off to “underwhelm” my brain and think a little more clearly. I don’t like that background and have decided that it has to go. It looks amateurish, and distracts from the subject. It took a couple days of being away from it to come up with another way to approach it, so I will be trying a new background when I get back to the studio, hopefully tomorrow. In my days off, I got some important stuff done around the house while I cogitated on that background thing…stay tuned!
After killing a lot of time yesterday trying to get the perfect pattern drawn for lettering in “The Woman At The Well”, I didn’t get very far…poor spacing; letters turned out to be too large; etc., etc. Today, I chucked all that and decided to freehand my own pattern, and that’s what I did. Not perfect, but no one’s handwriting is, right? It works for me, and I think it will work just fine for the painting. Closing in on color time!!!
Yay! I have finished the pattern for “Woman At The Well”…except for the lettering at the bottom, which will quote the passages from John that this scene is based upon. I hope to do that tomorrow, but since lettering is tedious and boring for me, it may take a little longer. I don’t care; I’m not on a time constraint so I will take as long as it takes
to get it right, but I DO want to start laying down color, so I hope it doesn’t take too long!
Today I began working on the pattern for “The Woman At The Well”. I had photographed my model, Amina Antoury back last Thanksgiving. She is the niece of my pastor, and her heritage is Moroccan and Sicilian Italian. She definitely had the “look” I was searching for, and I’m grateful to Pastor Dave for bringing us together last year when she was visiting from NY where she lives. I have not yet worked in the water pot the Samaritan woman left sitting at the well, or the well itself, but that will come tomorrow. When I get the pattern completed, I will post a photo of it.
Well, I have been very silent here for the past few months while Jim has worked out many problems with the site. We still don’t have it just the way we want it, but time waits for no one, and I have finished some major projects I needed to complete before I could work on this project unencumbered. I don’t multi-task well, so ol’ “one-track mind” here does major stuff only one project at a time…and now it’s time for Women’s Studies! I have been getting the studio ready for work, and hope to begin tomorrow!
Join me in my journey of painting ‘Original Art’ with pastel paints.
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