"The Juice" is finished!

On July 21 I started a painting of a little boy nicknamed "The Juice" (his initials are O.J.).  He's the young son of Lars, friend of mine from college, one of those ruddy blond children with dimples on every joint.  His face was one of the most difficult I've ever painted.  I have always maintained that blonds have the toughest coloring to paint, and children are the toughest age to paint...so blond children are exhausting. But terrifically cute.

Here are some day-to-day highlights.

The main reason children are so difficult to paint with watercolor is because they have no wrinkles.  Any time you add new color to a dry area, crisp edges form around the new color's perimeter, so to combat that you need to wet the entire face with clear water first.  Then you can drop new colors onto the wet surface without creating wrinkles.  This takes time and patience.  I can paint most adult faces this size (3 inches tall) in a couple of hours, but The Juice took six.

Earlier today as I was blonding his hair (he was a little too dark in places), I realized that the dark speck at 2 o'clock on The Juice's head was not some hard-to-correct paint blotch but merely a piece of dust that was easily brushed off.

I painted the bass and deer on Day Two.  I felt a great deal of nostalgia as I worked on them; my college drawing professor had us draw one taxidermied beast after another for two years.  I liked the Wes Andersoniness of the composition and various background details, but the more I painted the more the picture reminded me of a standard "Madonna Enthroned" Renaissance fresco.  Front and center: an enrobed, angelic character surrounded by ultramarine blue.  In the background: the deer and bass become a couple of saints and maybe a donor.  The truly strange barbershop, which Lars described as being straight out of a David Lynch movie (high praise), gives the scene the necessary otherworldly atmosphere.  And Spider-Man is the Holy Spirit, obviously.  I should title this "The Juice" Enthroned with Bass and Deer.

Then I had to put the project on hold for a few days after a certain world-renowned film critic sent me the following art books in the mail!

The books: British Watercolors, The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse, and The Illustrators: The British Art of Illustration (our cat Quixote was not included in the deal).  All three books were totally relevant to the way I paint and even featured artists I've long admired but wanted to know more about.  And Roger Ebert sent them...somehow to me!  So that was completely unbelievable, and I took a few days off to paint a thank-you card for him.  I'll post it in a few days.

Then yesterday and today, after a three-day hiatus, I finished The Juice!  The rest of the painting was a nice combination of big and small areas.  Sometimes I'm in the mood to paint tiny, but after the detail-laden Ebert picture, I was eager to load up my larger brushes and paint that chair.  Later I painted the Spider-Man (this is the second time he's appeared in a painting of mine, oddly).  Except for one bottle that I could barely see in the original photo, I made up everything on the shelves in the background.   Actually, those are some things I have on my own shelves near my studio table.  

I'm awfully happy with this little guy!

Comments

[The Beautiful Kind]

This painting ain't worth 2 bucks. Get it???

[Kelly Eddington]

You are something special, TBK. :)

[Melinda]

Damn. Spidey got back!

[Anna]

It's hard to believe this is even a watercolour. Amazing! The Juice's toes are absolutely squishable!!!!

[Medical Advice]

fabulous paint..now ihave an interesting to paint when i see your paint so wonderful and im so impressed.

[Lars]

I love your description of The Juice painting as a "Madonna Enthroned" type thing! I can TOTALLY see that. There are a lot of ways to look at this painting and interpret it and ain't that what great art's all about