Painting portraits in watercolor is very difficult because the medium is so unforgiving. Once you put it down, you have to live with the result. Oils make a great medium for portraits and flesh in general because it has the effect of being smooth and changes tone so gradually. Plus, you can scrape it off and start over if you don't like it. It takes days to dry!
The only oil painting class I ever took was for painting desertscapes with pallet knives in the mid 1980's.
My first experience with the medium was a bunch of paint by numbers around the age of ten. I would get them at the dime store and play around with them. You might notice that some of my work still looks a little "paint by numbery". I graduated to original paintings of people around high school. My bedroom was my studio with a work table, paints, linseed oil, and turpentine. No telling how many brain cells I killed off sleeping in my room. I did have good clean up habits where paint was concerned and always cleaned my brushes. I also painted in college. The painting of "Legs" was during this period and wound up in an art show. I was a huge fan of M.C. Escher and took a class in how to make tessellations (teselarse: Latin for "to tile") which are repeated patterns. Here's a website if you'd like to learn to make your own. When I was doing these, it was low tech as we didn't have computers. http://www.tessellations.org/index.htm
After college, I didn't paint until I got married in 1988. Painting can be an excellent escape if you are looking for that. Not in the linseed oil and turpentine kind of way, but in that you will usually get so engrossed in your work that you will lose track of time. I could paint for six hours and it would feel like one or two. Most of my paintings took three days. The first one was the painting of the grandmother and child done from a photograph from the book Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane. I was so moved by the book and I fell in love with the pictures in the middle of the biography. One of the things that lent this particular one to portraiture is that the shadows were so stark. As a "paint by numberist", I needed areas that were clearly delineated from one another. As one of my fellow artists likes to say, color gets all the credit, but values do all the work. I was also in my monochromatic phase, maybe because the photo was a black and white and I didn't want to take any risks.
Two years later I did another monochromatic of two boys working on a model airplane that I found in an old encyclopedia. I made it more dramatic by putting a dark background on it. I was well into my emotionally messy divorce at this time and needed a great escape. If you're in need on an escape, you might as well seek out something that won't kill you over time and will, in fact, add to your life. Any kind of art falls into that category.
The last one was in 1997 when Mother died. We had taken some pictures of her in her final months on the back patio. I finally decided to step outside the box and use color. The version above is actually the second of this painting. The first one was muted and depressing. This one has a lot of vivid colors, just like the photograph, and I added a colorful background. The cool thing about painting is that you are not married to the photograph. You can use all the artistic license you want. Look at any Picasso! After this one I did a self portrait of me fishing in Alaska on vacation. I got the feedback that it looked nothing like me. It's all in the eyes of the beholder. What we find in my watercolor class is that the whole class can do the same subject and they will each bear the style of the painter who did it. My other response, "If you want an exact reproduction, stick with the photograph."
I've had a few requests for paintings over the years and here's what I tell them: I don't want to paint a photograph that is going to continue hanging on the wall or something done in a portrait studio. The idea is to have an original work of art, not an exact copy of a beloved photo that you can compare to see if the painter "got it right" while they are hanging side by side. The ideal would be a clear spontaneous photograph with deep shadows, preferably a photo that will be thrown in the bottom of the photo drawer after being painted. $500 minimum per face.
Any kind of hobby is for the practitioner's own fulfillment and enjoyment. Whether it is for escape, relaxation, cash on the side, or self development, it has to be fun. If you try something and it turns out to be just an exercise in frustration, just move on to the next hobby. You will find something that gets your fired up and, for a few hours, over your blues.
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