Drawing Stephanie

I went to Dorian and Liana's last Sunday only to find they were having Stephanie pose for painting all day. I was totally unprepared for this. However, I had, almost accidentally, brought along a bunch of tubes of gouache -- those tubes I'd dug out of the attic last month -- so I worked with what I had and managed this painting on black paper.

This was a little strange for me because, first, I haven't used gouache like this in over a decade. And second because I decided to pretend I was Dorian and paint the way he does, with broad slashes and little pats, instead of how I usually do, which is with a lot of strokes and wrist action. He also holds his brushes way back near the end of the handle, while I tend to hold them like pencils, up near the ferrule. Nancy, one of the other artists, calls Dorian Zorro.

So this painting is built up from areas of color through layers of finer and finer detail. I really wished I had oils for this. Gouache has this tendency, which oils don't and which I'd forgotten, which is as you're laying down a layer, the layer below lifts off and floats away. Thus the ground has a way of resurfacing as you work, which is especially annoying when your ground is, say, black as the unforgiving night of a poor artist's soul.

In any case, here it is. It came out okay, especially considering I had barely a single correct tool.