Client's mother -- in her youth

[Terri Ficenec]

32x24", Oil on Linen Panel
(posthumous)

[Richard Budig]

You must be an ambitious person because that's an ambitious work. Quite nice, especially the iri (plural for iriseseseses . . . oh, someone stop me) I'd like to hear about your method . . . how you got through it all. Good work.

[Terri Ficenec]

Thanks Richard! This piece did have an intricate background, dogwood and irises were favorites of the subject. So I spent a fair amount of time this Spring out with my daughter (for light position and scale) taking photos of blooming dogwoods and irises in the late afternoon sun - since the reference images of the subject had a nearly sideways cast to the lighting.

I had three very old (early 1940's I think?) black & white images of her from different angles and used a model with similar coloring (dark brunette/brown eyes/wavy hair) to figure out her fleshtones and hair. The original reference was usable for most of her blouse, but I had to create the skirt using stuffed sweatpants posed under a teal skirt. . . Really wanted the clothing to be consistent with the time period she was from. . .

I approached the painting by first blocking in very rough position and color then methodically creeping across with detail. I found the dogwood branches quite a bit more work than the irises, just because there were so many branches and I'd realized as I was out photoing them that dogwood has a very characteristic 'swoopiness' (<- for lack of a better word!) that I wanted to make sure to capture.

I've got images of the painting in progress with (very brief!) notes here:
http://terrificenec.com/page/wip/current.htm

Thanks again!

[Richard Budig]

Terri . . . thank you very much for the info. I looked at the progressive series on your site, which was very interesting. One thing . . . it appears you also did an underpainting. Would you tell me a little about that? Do you do this most of the time? I ask because I'm finding that I am doing more underpaintings lately. For some reason, I don't like taking the time to do it, but when it comes to painting, I'm usually glad that I did.

[Terri Ficenec]

Oh gosh no, I wouldn't dignify that by calling it an underpainting. The gray version of her face at the very beginning is rather a very rough sketch without much concern as to likeness... I just used it to work out the scale of her head relative to her shoulders/torso. As they were from different reference shots and although I used a model for coloring, her proportions were not as lanky as the subject's.

The first pass (up until the comment says 'finished roughing in') was just to cover the white canvas and to get approximate local local/value in so that I had something to assess colors against. You can see the first pass of color on her face was done before most of the background darks around her face and winds up being far too light.

Mostly I just worked background to foreground, deepening her facial flesh-tones when it became apparent that they desparately needed it -- I left details of likeness until the very end.

[Richard Budig]

Thanks, Terri. It makes sense to me.