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Portrait practice
Jan. 29th, 2020 07:05 pmIn an act of alarming hubris, I offered to make art for both the Fandom Trumps Hate and Fandom For Australia (bushfires) auctions. The idea is that people bid like in a conventional auction, only the winning bidder makes a donation to one of a list of approved charities rather than a payment, and then receives... something. In my case, a photo of a painting. (Possibly also the painting itself, if they want to pay the postage, but that's not part of the arrangement).
I felt the number of people wanting pictures of obscure Silmarillion Elves was probably pretty limited, so I decided to offer 'any fandom' and in service of this, try making a couple of actor portraits. These were made using the grisaille technique, where you paint the shadows first, then add layers of more or less translucent colour. I'm not sure I got it quite right, but I think these are recognisable as Good Omens Aziraphale and Crowley, even if they do seem a bit... stiff.
In another act of alarming hubris, I asked Pp for membership of the local pro artists organisation for Christmas, which he did indeed give me. I have just read their newsletter full of exhibitions and ideas and scheduled events for the year and am currently paralysed with terror. One of the events is a thing where you can pay £5 to be *considered* to put your painting in their exhibition, and the schedule has a time for pickup of 'non-selected works'. The idea of slinking in to pick up paintings that had been deemed not good enough to hang on a community centre wall for the weekend is paralysing.
Perhaps it will be less terrifying tomorrow. Or perhaps I need to spend another year practicing and thinking about this.
I felt the number of people wanting pictures of obscure Silmarillion Elves was probably pretty limited, so I decided to offer 'any fandom' and in service of this, try making a couple of actor portraits. These were made using the grisaille technique, where you paint the shadows first, then add layers of more or less translucent colour. I'm not sure I got it quite right, but I think these are recognisable as Good Omens Aziraphale and Crowley, even if they do seem a bit... stiff.
In another act of alarming hubris, I asked Pp for membership of the local pro artists organisation for Christmas, which he did indeed give me. I have just read their newsletter full of exhibitions and ideas and scheduled events for the year and am currently paralysed with terror. One of the events is a thing where you can pay £5 to be *considered* to put your painting in their exhibition, and the schedule has a time for pickup of 'non-selected works'. The idea of slinking in to pick up paintings that had been deemed not good enough to hang on a community centre wall for the weekend is paralysing.
Perhaps it will be less terrifying tomorrow. Or perhaps I need to spend another year practicing and thinking about this.
