Olivia Moon oil on masonite 6.25x7.5x1
A little portrait of my lovely new niece Olivia Moon. I finally got to meet her in person over Christmas break. She was so quiet and peaceful and HUNGRY. When she wasn't napping she was feeding. She's an absolute joy and I feel very lucky to be her uncle. Technical notes: I think I learned a bit more about the importance of edge state of certain features of the face with this painting. Initially the edge of the bottom lip was too strong of a line. Her lips looked like those kooky wax lips you can buy at Spencers, and that old Sargent quote "A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth" kept echoing in my head. I went back and forth between the photo and the painting trying to figure it out. The thickness, local color, overall shape, and orientation seemed right, but the lips were still too strong a feature. First I tried to highten the tone of the lips so that the contrast between the lip and skin color was less severe. This helped but it still didn't look right. So I looked some more and realized that by breaking up the lip/face boundary with a few small brush strokes in a couple areas I could achieve the effect I was looking for. Perhaps not a total success (what is?), but I think I learned a couple things from this one.