In Living Color 52 - Pastor Larry

Out of all the paintings I have done so far I think this is the one I spent the most time on deciding whether I wanted to paint it or not.  One of the ladies in the art group I meet with each week decided it would be fun if each of us painted the same photo using our own style and medium.  Now usually I am up to trying something new but this photo was a portrait of our Pastor and we were going to present them to him as a Christmas gift.  No pressure there!  Well four of the ladies got started and had worked on them for a few weeks while I was still deciding what I wanted to do.  At last I decided why not give it a try, if I didn't like the finished painting I just would not present it.

Here is the photo that we started with.

Pastor Larry

Of the four that had begun Margaret decided to do a graphite drawing, Marge was working in acrylics after the Brito style, Bonnie was also using acrylics in what I dubbed as 'dabbelism' and Trish was doing acrylics in two-tone.  Everyone was working on a 8" X 10" canvas which also gave me reason for pause since I hadn't done much with acrylics on canvas and didn't want to begin with a portrait. But it was fun watching each week to see what was produced by each lady.

Below is a recent picture of the group of ladies I meet with.  Since this painting was done we have added a couple and lost one to other commitments. 
Top row left to right:  Janet, Bonnie, Billie, Marge and Paulette
Bottom row left to right:  Angie and Margaret















Once I completed the cartoon I decided I had to do watercolor on watercolor paper and would then mount it to a canvas so that all the paintings would be unison. 

I started with the shirt even though it is wise to leave blacks until the end of the painting so you don't accidentally cause it to bleed into the lighter colors if you drip water by accident.  I then moved to the first layers of skin tone and with just this much done I was really nervous about the end result.

 

Knowing that I needed to eventually paint Pastors eyes and didn't want to practice on the original painting I did a small sample and then made notations as to what changes I would make on the painting itself.  Using this sample I was able to lay it on top of the original to see how it would come together....well sort of.

 

With that little exercise done I went for the real thing and got brave enough to work on the mouth as well.

 

It was now time to work on refining the details and adding more layers of paint to even out the skin tone.  Keep in mind as you view the photos that each one is taken at a different point in time under different lighting conditions so they won't be consistent as far as color goes.  With this sitting I worked on adding the brows, refining the eyes and ears and unfortunately adding some wrinkles, or should I call them life lines, along with completing the overall color of the skin.

 

 I now felt I was finished with his face and decided not to try to improve anything since I have found that when I do I end up with mud from overworking the colors.  From here I had two areas to complete and since I was dreading the thought of how to paint the various layers of the hair I went for the background.  Actually I really didn't know how I wanted to do the background either so I played around on another sheet of WC paper until I came up with a simple but colorful example.  For this effect I painted wet on wet blending various colors as I moved around the paper.  As I completed each section in the movement I added a sprinkling of salt to give it one more dimensional effect.

 

Okay, now I don't have a choice, I need to paint the hair.  So again back to the practice sheet to try various colors and methods.  I came up with my best efforts and started with the lighter colors and continued layering until I was done.  This photo will give you an example of what the Pastor might look like when he reaches his fill of wisdom many years down the road.

 

Pastor Larry Linkous

Watercolor

8" X 10"