Alastair: 12-month Portrait

I keep thinking I have blogged this, and it appears I haven't, so I must rectify that! If you follow me on social media you will have seen snippets of this piece some months back; it's a piece I did for a friend's birthday in July. Her son, Alastair, was also born in July, just a week after her birthday, so it seemed like an excellent time to give her a 12-month portrait of his first 12 months of life. I was inspired by her remarking that he changed so much from day to day. I enlisted the help of her mother, who made sure I had a selection of nice photos for every month. Babies are so expressive, I had fun choosing lots of different moods! 

The painting is just under A3 in size, so each individual portrait is quite small:

I took a number of timelapse videos while I was working. All of them were shared after I had finished the painting and given it away, so that it was a complete surprise.

A little #timelapse #video of this #babyportrait. 💜 #wip #workinprogress #baby #babyboy #painting #art #watercolour #watercolor #paint #artistatwork #cute #sweet

A post shared by Alison Mutton (@alene.art) on Jul 12, 2016 at 12:47am PDT

Another #timelapse #wip #babyportrait 💜 #workinprogress #baby #babyboy #cute #sweet #artistatwork #painting #paint #watercolour #watercolor #portraiture #babyportraiture

A post shared by Alison Mutton (@alene.art) on Jul 13, 2016 at 12:46am PDT

These last two timelapses are two parts of the same painting. The limit for a timelapse is 10 minutes, so I couldn't fit a whole painting into one. As it was, I always started with the base skin tones already down and dry - no one wants to watch a timelapse of paint drying!

Some more #babyportrait #wip #timelapse. 💜 #portraiture #portrait #babyportraiture #baby #babyboy #sweet #cute #watercolour #watercolor #paint #painting #art #artistatwork #artistofinstagram

A post shared by Alison Mutton (@alene.art) on Jul 14, 2016 at 12:23am PDT

Finishing the #watercolour #painting in this baby portrait. The first half of this video is in my gallery. 😊 #watercolor #artistsofinstagram #artistatwork #art #baby #portrait #portraiture #babyportrait #babyportraiture #paint #wip #workinprogress #timelapse #hyperlapse #cute #sweet #babyboy #process

A post shared by Alison Mutton (@alene.art) on Jul 16, 2016 at 12:35am PDT

Each individual portrait took in the region of 40 to 60 minutes to sketch and paint, so we're looking at somewhere in the region of 8 to 12 hours for the whole piece. I sketched each portrait out in pencil first, and then it's almost entirely watercolour, apart from a few coloured pencil touches, mainly in the background. I'm really a mixed-media girl. 

I decided to keep the focus on the face by making all of his clothes white - in reality he has a varied wardrobe, but that made everything rather messy when 12 pictures and placed side-by-side.

Winsor and Newton watercolours and series 7 brushes, with Prismacolor pencils, on Moleskine watercolour paper.

This makes a great gift for a mother in your life (or for yourself), so if you'd like to commission something similar, please contact me via my website - I'd love to discuss it with you!

Progress: Miniature

I live! I've been pretty busy, with a portrait that will be finished tomorrow, plus various other things, and have been neglecting my blog. But here's a half-completed sample miniature. I plan to offer miniature commissions (framed), and therefore need some proper samples:

This is 6.5cm (2.5") in diameter, Winsor & Newton watercolours on Bristol Board – and about five hours so far. I'm using a photo of me when I was about six. 

Ginger Rogers Miniature

I came across this today, and thought I'd better finish it off. I started it when I did the Kathryn Grayson Miniature, but then I got busy and left it unfinished. 

So here we have Ginger Rogers, from a very early 30s publicity shot:

This was done on Bristol Board using a 0.5mm mechanical pencil with a #B lead and two small blending stumps. The reference was from DoctorMacro.com

I can't remember how long I'd spent on it before today, but it can't have been long, as I hadn't got very far. It took me about an hour today, so overall it was probably about 1.5 hours. Not as long as Kathryn Grayson, but also nowhere near as detailed. I don't feel I've quite caught the look in her eyes, but I'm not sure what's missing. Maybe I'll work it out eventually, but for now I'm calling in done. 

Finally, here's a photo to show scale. The whole thing is 5cm in diameter. 

Imaginary Miniatures

Way back when I did honours in Illustration (2008) I created a picture book. (My topic was 'A Modern Take on the Golden Age of Illustration', so it was a book in the Golden Age style, while attempting to bring in modern aspects of illustrative storytelling).

It could use a bit of a revamp now, but after spending a whole year drawing the characters, I became very attached to them, and every now and then I miss them and get the urge to draw them again.

Practicing miniatures naturally brought them to my mind again, as the endpages of the picture book were a character gallery of miniature portraits (albeit in the sepia linework style common to Golden Age endpapers)

These were done with a dip pen (a mapping one) in brown ink, and then lightened and overlayed on a parchment texture in Photoshop. 

So I thought I'd try more realistic portraits of the main characters, in pencil.

So here we have Katia, Edmund and Adele. 

These are all roughly 5cm in diameter, although they were drawn freehand, so that's not quite exact. 

To see more of them:

The earliest painting of Katia, when I was still working out her overall look.

Spreads from the picture book:

Katia thinking.

Edmund failing to look dashing.

Adele. 

Miniature: Kathryn Grayson

I've been playing around with doing miniature portraits lately. 

I started out using watercolour, and did a couple (I've done one of Merle Oberon as Marguerite in The Scarlet Pimpernel, but that's awaiting a partner in a matching one of Leslie Howard at the moment) and then decided to try my hand at using pencil. 

Watercolour is actually much easier, because the brushes are so much smaller than the 0.5 pacer lead I use when drawing, so it's easier to get really fine, accurate lines. 

This was in fact a double-experiment, because I've never tried doing a pencil drawing on Bristol Board before. 

While I'm practicing, I'm having fun using actors and actresses, and here we have Kathryn Grayson:

This was done on Bristol Board using a 0.5mm mechanical pencil with a #B lead, a very small blending stump, a cotton bud, a touch of a #8B graphite pencil, and white gouache (for the veil), applied with a 6/0 and 3/0 brush. 

Size is 5cm diameter (1.9") 

To give an idea of scale, here's a snap including my reference, my trusty magnifying glass, my pacer, and one of my paintbrushes. 

At the moment, 5cm is about as small as I'm happy going – but hopefully I shall get better and they'll get smaller.