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Originally Posted by Michele Rushworth
I think this will make a nice painting, but isn't it a lot more fun and personal to create your own composition?
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Fair question
It already is personal for me because I chose it. Call it an adoption instead of bloodline birth,.LOL.
All the paintings I am doing during the few months before I restart my portrait business back up again are for my own selfish joy of getting to paint purely what I want to paint both in terms of images and in terms of mediums. Once I start taking commissions again, I will not have this opportunity but for rare pockets of time. I am savoring every second of it.
Some of the paintings from this time are already and will be purely my own from initial plan to final brushstroke and some will be ones that I am inspired to paint that others were blessed to capture and were willing to give me permission to paint (such as with Erin in this painting). In gratitude I will be sending her a giclee reproduction of the painting.
It will have my own decisions whether to keep or change elements. Though I want to keep the elements that I think will be special to Erin. This was taken the day she and her son, the boy in the picture, went strawberry picking. Things tied in with that memory will stay. But I am making changes that don't matter such as removing white tags on the clothes that are distracting, a different crop than the original, a different angle, removal of the wear pattern from the sliding door so there is not such a strong horizontal line from wear marks to pants to lower barn board, and probably changing the cement to grasses and spring flowers.
No, it doen't feel any less personal a painting for me than the last one I created which was entirely mine from composition, to photography, to inventing fingers that weren't there in the reference, to the last and final brush stroke. This one is my adopted 'child'.