Rebecca Rose Artist

My palette afterwards. I selected bright, vibrant and saturated colors - very unrealistic skin tones. Palette and palette knives.  Francoise Nielly works almost exclusively with palette knives.  I wish I had a better range of tools, but it was fun to use these ones anyhow. First attempt.  This first attempt is somewhat successful.  Some areas became muddy, and I wasn't totally consistent with the warm/light and cool/shade choices.  I began to really play up the eyes. Trying to resolve the neck/chest area.  I chose a very light grey background to keep things very neutral and simple.  The chest becomes more and more abstract.

Flesh tones study.  I wanted to get the portrait as realistic as possible before creating the layer of abstracted colors.  It turns out that creating skin tones is fairly complicated.  It was also incredibly difficult to repeatedly create a consistent color, which became a problem when reworking such a large piece. White, red cadmium, ultramarine blue, burnt umber, yellow oxide. Always mixing. It's surprising that skin tones need all these different colors to look "natural". Undergoing this process made me respect those who do work in realistic portraits.  My personal style always leans toward abstract so eventually I let myself off the leash and started to use fun colors!

A Pop Art Portrait.  I probably could have stopped at this point, but it didn't look enough like the artist I chose, Francoise Nielly.  The face is more or less accurate. My painting underwent a series of transformations: 

One of my students dropped her artwork onto my floor and I've always thought it looked like a butterfly fell through the ground.

As my painting teacher loves figure and portraits, she tasked us with creating very large (30" x 40" at least) versions of a self-portrait.  We each chose artists working primarily in figure upon whom to base our style.  I decided to go with Francoise Nielly... a French artist working in oils on canvas.  She crops the face very close, emphasizes the eyes and chooses boldly abstracted colors to sculpt the facial features. Here is an example: Asia by Francoise Nielly.  2018. I started with a close photo of my face (a selfie): This photo has good contrasts but also includes my neck. Here are a few sketches: Sketchbook. On canvas. As you can see, they are not very good sketches, proportionately.  I realized later when I was trying to create the painting, then I had to return over and over to the photo, constantly correcting.   My first attempt at the painting looked like this: First draft of self-portrait. The eyes a...

Here are a few more easy origami sculptures I made as prizes for well-behaved students in my dance classes.  I also tried to make an elephant but it was too advanced for me and so I gave up pretty easily. A Rose.  I used a q-tip to curl the edges. A dog.  So cute. Butterfly (blue side). Butterfly (pink side).