193: Natalie & Ava Feb 2022

This is a first day of school snapshot of my granddaughters. Natalie's sign says "First Day of 7th Grade"; Ava's says "First Day of High School". Portraits of living people are risky. Everyone knows what they're supposed to look like. There's no wiggle room for the artist to cop-out and say, "Oh, I did that on purpose." A detail made with a single hair of a paintbrush, a fraction of a milimeter long will change a smile into a smirk, or a graceful hand into a club. Be kind.

This is my third painting of the girls. See also #95 and #138

I used a new (to me) tracing technique to tranfer the photograph onto the board. It's complicated. I've got an app called "Projector" running on my iPhone. It superimposes two images: the staticc photo of the girls, and a live video feed of my hand as it draws on the gessoed board. My iPhone is sharing its sceen on my MacBook. I'm looking at the Macbook watching a disembodied image of my hand and the growing drawing. There's maybe a half second delay between when I move my pencil and when the pencil line shows up on the board. The enlargement is determined by the distance between the iPhone and the board. It's confusing. There is no depth perception. The camera only has one eye. In two hours, I never got good at it.