Tuesday

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So the reality is that yesterday was her real birthday and you might be asking, “Well what prey tell did you get her?”

I did a 24x36 inch portrait of the children out in the garden having tea. The two boys didn’t like that idea, but it fits in with my daughter.  I must admit I was inspired by John Singer Sargent’s piece “The Daughters of Edward Boit” He did their painting in the interior of the living room, with some of the girls lost in the shadows; just a beautiful piece!

Now I figured my wife would not want our kids lost in the shadows of our living room, so I opted for outside light and besides it’s in what my wife calls “The Italian Garden”, something she designed and built herself. 

So I started about a month ago with a general block-in. I had other paintings to work on as well, so this piece was brought up a little bit at a time, lest she get suspicious of my secret activities.  After all I couldn’t just say I was working on nothing for the past week; to pull it off I need to show that production was not slowing down, hence the smaller boat paintings!!!

I then worked on the faces trying to capture the likenesses, not an easy thing to do with several faces being painted over and over again.

And then worked on more of the details of the clothing and background.

Then it dawned on me. To be honest it was after one of the crit sessions, when they said that the middle figure, our oldest child was too small. He looked like a dwarf.  I asked if it would help to just lower the legs?  They responded with a stern, “ No, just paint the @%#% over again, but larger, don’t be lazy!!!”

So like any artist you cringe and white out the figure, you spent some much time on, only to re-paint it all over again correctly.  Six hours of hard labor down the drain….

Now it looks a lot better and it also got the stamp of approval from my wife, meaning I got the likeness of the kids down. I figured she would be the hardest critic on that subject.  “Every mother knows her own children inside and out”

Richard Boyer