Ashelyn !

Ashelyn ! is my first serious attempt at portrait work. She is my best friend's first grand daughter, and a delight to her family. I worked from a cropped photo taken by her father, Chris, and gave the painting to Tanya and Chris for Christmas.

I used a method similar to projecting or tracing the image to obtain the basis for the painting. This gave me a value-guide as well as the correct placement/shape of her eyes, which I am finding to be absolutely critical if I am to get even a hint of likeness in a portrait. Of course, once one begins to apply paint, that structure disappears and there go the crutches ! A great deal of care is needed to make best use of those guides before they are obliterated forever.

This begins to sound positively intimidating ! No wonder it has taken me so long to begin attempting to paint "real people" ! Maybe I will be able to continue with my pursuit of "subjective realism", a term I have just coined to describe nearly all of my paintings, in spite of the demands made by portraits...