(Very) Belated Valentine’s Day

Portrait of Aftyn Rose from her Belated Valentine’s Day video. This is a return to color work after a couple months of monochrome value studies. It was pretty successful, I think. I am seeing shapes more clearly now, and this came to fruition with a minimum of hassle. It finally gave me a chance to depict a couple of distinct physiological features I haven’t before – the way the crease at the corner of her mouth doesn’t quite meet the one coming down from her nose and the subtle folds of her eyelids, which I think are called partial epicanthic folds.

As good as it looks, it’s not a very successful painting. It doesn’t express anything. It’s a nice picture of a beautiful woman.

By trade I am an engineer — a programmer. The things I find pleasing in that field are binary. You solved the problem; you didn’t solve the problem. The test suite runs are either green or red. There’s a pass fail filter on everything.

In painting, you rarely get those kinds of success/fail states. Maybe this mark looks marginally better than that one. But in copying references, I did kind of find one. This picture looks accurate. It is a very good representation of the source photo. I even found myself trying to eliminate visible brush strokes, since they weren’t present in the reference. I admire brush strokes in a painting. This has a polish that’s counter-productive.

When I started off this piece, I was challenging myself to keep the color training wheels off. “Don’t sample colors. Just pick stuff that looks right and keep experimenting until you get it. There’s no schedule you have to keep.” That lasted about halfway through. While trying to do her face, I couldn’t get things to look right. I lost confidence, and instead of persevering, I went back to sampling colors. The whole thing came together fast after that.

Here’s what I realized tonight, thinking about that fact. I don’t need to learn color theory, or gesture, or value, or line control, or any of those things. They will happen in time. What I really need to learn is how to get over that loss of confidence that prevented me from pushing myself forward. The fear of making a bad looking picture kept me from striving to do better. That is the one skill I really need to develop.