Painted this over the weekend. It's large for me - on a 24"x48" gallery wrapped canvas.
I did it in acrylic because I didn't have time for oil paint to dry. I wanted to get some work out to Market Central because my artist friend Glenda Brown and I are sharing a wall.
Janice Joplin is incredibly hard to capture. Her looks and even her features seem to change from picture to picture... so I just focused on the picture I was working from.
Acrylic is also a challenge for me because I don't use it very often. I was really impressed with the masterson palette I used, because over the course of the three days I was working on it, the paint didn't dry out. That was really impressive. But working with the acrylic seems sluggish. The paint gets sticky so fast there's no time to blend your colors on the canvas. I used a gel medium with the paint to try to keep it pliable but it still dried too quickly. I do believe there are some mediums on the market I can get to slow down the drying time - I might look into that. I just need the paint to stay workable for long enough to blend. It may have also been that I wasn't using enough water while painting. On the flip side, the whole reason I used acrylics was for the fast drying time. So I guess you can't have it all!
I was encouraged with this portrait because my husband liked it so much, he actually wanted to keep it!
