Portrait painting from "life" ;)

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Haha, a month or two ago I was perusing the local thrift store with the kids, and came across this beauty school mannequin in the toy department. It has real human hair :o and isn't really very lifelike, in my opinion. But I thought she might hold still and let me paint her ;) And she does. But painting portraits is sort of really, really hard. I think it was in a John F. Carlson book that I read something along the lines that a good picture is nothing but a series of good corrections. And I was correcting and correcting and correcting here (mostly the drawing, of course--the color I may worry about later). Which sometimes feels a little discouraging, but that's just what it is. Correcting. Over and over and over. At least the setup is very repeatable. And I guess $4.99 was a pretty reasonable unlimited model fee ;) Also, I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing, but that doesn't mean I won't eventually, right? Except for one 20 minute attempt at painting my kids while they were eating, this was the first time I've ever actually tried to paint a portrait from life. So, here's to trying again. And this attempt was about 2.5 hours.

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