Bae Doo Na

Another painting in my recent celebrity portrait series, I present South Korean actor Bae Doo Na. Because my subjects are almost always people I admire, I would have expected to get around to her much earlier than this. I love Bae Doo Na’s work, and have been following her for many years. The first place I saw her burning up the screen was in Park Chan Wook’s Sympathy for Mr Vengeance. I then sought out everything I could find. I discovered a woman who never shied away from making bold, fun choices. In recent years, she’s done some English-language work and a few of those K-dramas that are tearing up the streaming charts, including a particularly fun take on zombies.

This painting is another run at the “brush economy” style, with bigger, bolder strokes. I feel like I’m improving at the approach, but I do still have the “this will never work” phase in my head through a lot of the process. The Procreate brush I used, Quoll, has a maddeningly watery blend style that makes working in details almost impossible. You can see in places where I felt precision was important, and therefore I made a bunch of passes, that it stirs in noise that can make it look overworked. The patch around her nose and lips suffer for it. As a result, I did a bit more than the usual liquify push/pull to shape things, which still feels like a cheat, but definitely lets me rescue a work from disaster.