Girls with Guns

I had never painted a human face (that is, making any attempt to realistically portray a human face) prior to my husband making a birthday request of me last spring:

"Can you paint me the cover of The Big Sleep?"

I will assume that he said "please" at some point, because I said yes.  Then, I learned that he specifically meant this cover:

 

Oh my goodness.  

People!  Bedsheets!  A gun!  Shadows!  Hair!  This shit be tough!

But he bought me a canvas, so I had to give it a try.  

Copying the art of another is a more fun and creative process than I had anticipated.  I guess there's a reason people do it all the time - imitation being a sincere form of flattery, learning from the masters, and all that.  The fact that I didn't have to come up with the image made my lazy brain feel very relaxed.  Whereas, approximating the colors... trying to capture her coquette look... that is what gave me conniptions.

My husband, being unfamiliar with oil paint, assumed the process would take me a week.

This is what I came up with, in June, after about three months of weekend labor. 

Although there is an obvious difference in quality, I must say I'm pretty darned proud of what I finished with.  Her skin looks relatively skin-like!  That is very likely a bed she is laying on! 

The tousle of her hair is beyond me, and don't even get me started on the lazy black outlines that the original artist basted upon her head.  I tried, and it immediately looked like I was trying too hard.  But hey, the bedsheets turned out about 1000% better than I'd anticipated.  And weirdly, the gun looks pretty good.

Butterface.  Yes, her face.  Her face is soooo narrow and perfect in the original.  There's just something so bad ass about her eyes, the ever-so-slight curve of her lip, the downward tilt of her chin, and the way her eyebrows disappear into a cloud of hair.  Yeah.  No.  I have painted a decent looking lady with a sunburned shoulder.

Husband was somewhat bummed that I did not stencil THE BIG SLEEP over her head, because, as it turns out, he had hoped for a very literal painting of the book cover.  But I made the decision early on that sacrificing all that space to the blue margin was questionable; replicating the multiple fonts would be very difficult, and basically, fuck it.

To date, this painting has made its way onto the wall which introduces people into the cool depths of our basement. 




This month, I decided to play with my oil paints, and felt inspired by my Pinterest board of portraits: 

There is a pretty bad-ass picture of Diana Riggs as Emma Peale, of the Avengers.  So, I picked up an old canvas that had a really ugly old picture on it, and decided to do an exercise in monochromatic painting, using only crimson, and wiping out parts of the background to supply some texture:

Again, only the second time I've painted a person with any attempt at reality.

Whenever I post some digital picture of a work, it seems to suffer in the process, as does my initial surety that the painting had turned out well.     

The gun came out pretty well in both paintings.  Maybe I should skip the girls and devote myself to painting guns?