Reflection

Above is my first painting of a person, acrylic on canvas (48"x30"). Here are the things I wanted to accomplish:

1) Create a painting of a person from an original dramatic POV.
2) Not to use a lot of black but to use dark colors instead (painterly style).
3) Painting a rain scene - a wet look look.

The reason for doing this painting is to expand my creativity without becoming too detailed or too realistic. It's amazing what you can accomplish if you force yourself to tackle something that is way over your head. I try to paint without any thinning the acrylic but forced to do so at times to get the look that I am aiming for.

I started this one by sketching out the basic profile then worked in the facial features. I started by painting the eyes and working towards the mouth. Next I streaked in a background that would symbolize the angle of the rain. I was going to just paint the car in graphically without detail but it looked too out of place, detached-so I had fun throwing in the detail. The last item that I worked on was the jacket because I wanted to run the paint off the canvas to reinforce the water feeling to this piece.