Insta-painting

A Study in Brown Boots, three.

For my friend's birthday, I decided to use three of the tiny canvasses that I already had (see previous post). There is something very gift-able about tiny canvasses. A large canvas can be a burden on those who are in transient parts of their lives (as I am too), which is not how you'd like your gift to be perceived of course.

To make these gifts more personal, I decided to use three of her Instagram photos as the theme.  She often takes photos of her shoes on Instagram so I chose a study of three brown boot photos, one of which happened to be a photo of both her feet and mine. I worked on them all at once so that I could keep the brown of the boots similar.

Here are the paintings underneath the original photos:

The floor got an accidental texturing when I went to just put on a light wash of burnt umber and paynes gray, but the paint had already started to congeal and harden on the palette. I liked the texturing though so I replicated it all over the floor. I think that it keeps the wood floor from swallowing up the brown boots. I was already worried that this one would have too much brown.

My feet are in the cowboy boots while hers are in the rounder boots, which are the same in all three pictures. The cowboy boots seemed difficult at first but they went in like a dream. Oddly it was the left plain boot which frustrated me the most--the perspective is still not my favorite but sometimes knowing when to stop messing about and just call it good is the best thing an artist can do. Otherwise you end up scraping and repainting one area and the whole picture can begin to look overworked.

I couldn't resist making the single leaf in this two boot shot more prominent than it really was. I think that it draws the eye over and even gives the impression that looking intently at that leaf was the true intention of the the owners of the two boots. 

I had a lot of fun with the leaves here and made them brighter and more prominent while also downplaying the texture of the ground. I'm still wondering if I should have gone with the texture or not--at the time it just seemed too busy. 

Raw Sienna and Burnt Umber are invaluable. It's amazing how difficult a really great brown is to mix if you only have primary colors. I find that a touch of raw sienna can enhance almost any mixture with added depth.

I'm quite happy with how these knees turned out. Once I saw how slick they came out, the rest of the project just flowed out (even though I stopped midway to go get brunch). 

The cloth of the skirt had a nice consistent pattern which made the shadows easy to build into the picture. 

One thing about these downward perspectives was that it was not intuitive which way was "up". Each canvas is 3x3 and should be hung near each other, in my opinion. Otherwise it would just be a random tiny painting of someone's feet.