I think this is mostly done. I’ve been trying to find a decent pose of Penelope for the last in a series of portraits that I’ve worked on for my wife over the past six or seven years. They are all 9x12 or smaller, and if I had known how much I prefer to work larger than that I would’ve just started with a larger size and likely experienced a lot fewer headaches.

Fortunately I have thousands of pictures of the girls to choose from these days and that means i have no shortage of potential references. That also makes it challenging at times because a good photograph doesn’t always make a good reference for a painting. In fact, I have come to believe, that the better the photograph is, the less you might have to say about it as a painting.

I have no interest in photorealistic painting, so that helps me to eliminate a lot of what I see as extraneous stuff from the compositions when I paint from photo reference. This picture, which is of Penelope on the rock wall looking out at the St Joseph River is more about her emotions and mine at the time of the painting probably than what is there. Her hair is basically an icon at this point, and her choice of clothing (a soccer jersey, some pants and some cowgirl boots), I think helps me to show who she is better than any clothing combination I could have invented on my own.

This photo was taken at the end of summer, and I just added some red and orange in the water to incorporate it into the background so that it wasn’t solely in her clothing. There were no leaves changing color at the time, and I am tempted to get into the tree reflections with some red and orange as well, but I know that really it’s time to move on. Once I move it off the easel I may carry the painting through to the edges at the top and bottom, but in order to frame the painting I will need to mat it, and that would make it pointless unless I glued it to a floating mount or something.

This one was done on Ampersand Pastelmat, and I love the way it takes the pastels, the unison pastels in particular. I think they’ve become my favorite. I really like the variety of Rembrandts in the half-stick set I bought, but as they run out, I’ll replace them all with unisons and keep my nupastels for hard edges when needed.

This is a gift for my wife, so it’s not for sale.