Sophie Portrait

The intention of this piece was to push me even further than before. For the Easter holidays, I had to paint an A2 free hand portrait of my younger sister Sophie. I was not allowed to draw with a pencil, I had to drive in at the deep end and paint straight onto the piece – which for me is terrifying as it something I do not do.

Figure 1 Sophie Portrait

This piece pushed and stressed me out more than the previous painting did. It stressed me out because I feel that the colours I was painting were not the colours in the photo and so they were not the right colours to paint, and I seemed to not be able to mix the correct colour – this is in relation to the skin, the other parts of the painting did not stress me out at all I think because I enjoyed and have always enjoyed painting hair and clothes more than skin colour. When I could do no more, because it had pushed me to my limit, my art teacher showed me how to paint in the style that she wanted me to, onto the painting. However, when I tried to do it, I feel that I just made it worse and the colours I was painting were not the correct ones and this stressed me out even more and demotivated me and I just did not want to carry on with it. Also, this style of painting is not the style I normally paint in, it was not controlled and organised. I had to change my style of painting, I could no longer use long brush strokes, I had to use splodges and paint the same colour in different places. I absolutely hated painting in this style, I know that I needed to try out a different style of painting, but I found myself getting stressed out by the pieces, whereas with my normal style I do not get stressed out and demotivated by those pieces, in fact I find that painting in my normal style to be calming and DESTRESSING, unlike the new style of painting my art teachers are trying to persuade me to do. I will never paint like this again, or at least I will try to get myself out of painting like this again.

Figure 2 Photograph of Sophie

From the experience of this painting, I have learnt that I can draw accurately without a grid, but I have learnt that I absolutely HATE – JE DETESTE – this painting, and I will never paint like this again, partly because it stresses me out and I do not want to be even more stressed out than I already am – I use art to calm and distress myself, but with this painting I seem to be doing the opposite. But I did like painting the hair, as for the hair I found it easy to differentiate the different colours I needed and how to get the shape and depth of the hair.

However, now looking at the photo and painting side by side and at roughly the same size, I can see that the painting I was doing was matching the skin of Sophie. But painting with colours that you cannot evidently see on the skin at a first glance confuses me and frustrates me because it makes me constantly question whether this colour is the right one. And as I was looking at it very closely whilst painting it, and the painting size was about four times as big as the photo, so I could not compare them side by side like I can now. Although I absolutely hate painting like this, I can see why this style of painting works and how it can easily create shape and depth in the painting. However, this style of painting is completely new to me, so if I had been taught to paint like this, or had more time to experiment with this style of painting, I could possibly become better at it and master the style. But, I have not and I do not. I know that I needed to try to get myself out of my comfort zone of drawing and painting by grid, and I do believe that as I have studied art I have tried to let go of the grid, or at least not use as many squares in a grid, and I try not to paint by square. By that, I mean that when I have drawn a piece by grid, I tend to ignore the grid whilst painting. I sometimes tend to ignore the grid when drawing and only use it as a reference to get the drawing as accurate as possible.

This piece has influenced the direction of my project as I will not paint in this style again, and I will continue to paint in the style I am comfortable with, but I will try to not grid up a photo as much as I have done in the past – not using a 1cm grid on the photo. But I do understand why I need to experiment with a new style of painting – but not just this one.

For this painting I painted a portrait of one of my younger sisters Sophie, scaled up onto an A2 piece of paper. I did not use a grid, instead I painted the entire piece with a deep red acrylic paint, and then I draw on the face, hair and clothing with paint. I then blocked out the hair, skin tone and clothes with a single colour for each. I then attempted to paint on the different colours and tones found in the photograph of Sophie. However, I tried and was successful with the hair and clothes, but not so much with the face. In fact, my art teacher had to help me with the skin because I did not know how to paint the skin the way I was meant to, and so she showed me how to do it. Nevertheless, I still found painting the skin hard, frustrating, and stress inducing.