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Lately, I've had the itch to paint pieces to decorate the house. I'm kinda tired of looking at the same ole stuff that's been up for entirely too long. So with the change of the seasons, I thought it'd be fun to create a coupla Halloween-y works o' art. And, ya know, if I'm gonna paint a painting, I gotta redecorate the whole room to work around it, right?!
Right.
I got the idea to paint mugshots of The Bride way back in August when I came across this amazing post of vintage lady mugshots. Tell me these aren't the most bad a$$ ladies you've ever seen. I've dreamt up stories for each and every one of them! I really wanted to paint my own set of mugshots after seeing these and decided that ones of The Bride would be perfect for Halloween. So, I dug out a canvas from The Hoarder Room (yes, this magical place of never ending chaos and thrifted goodness exists) that I'd painted black and texture-y years ago.
From there, I added two scratchily painted square shapes and started sketching in The Bride.
I blocked these in all fast and furious like before heading off to bed. I have this habit of getting hung up on small details. So if I can block in an entire painting in one stage of work, it really helps loosen me up, let go and enjoy the process a whole lot more.
Can we just talk about how gorgeous Elsa Lanchester is for a moment? Holy Macaroni, y'all. Those eyes! That pout! That lil dent-in-thingie on her chin. Gorg.
I tried my very best to do her justice. I've never painted monochromatic portraits before so that was fun and interesting. I liked it because I didn't have to mess with skin tones and such. However, the computer image was tricky since it didn't have a huge variety of values to work from. So whenever I would start to get frustrated with her face, I'd work on her hair. Which was super fun!
Ah, lookie! It's a What the Art Teacher Wore on the Weekend: pj's. It's a rare occasion when I'm not in pj's on the weekend. Don't judge.
There's some lil thingies that still bug me but, eh, she's done. And I'm pretty pleased.
And then there came the profile. UGH, y'all. That profile drove me bananaz!
Even at this stage, it still felt cartoon-y somehow. I stayed on the struggle bus for a while with this one. But I kinda blame the image I was working from.
It truly didn't offer me much value on the surface of her face because of the way the photo was lit. Everytime I painted her face, she just looked so flat. But, look at the photo, it looks flat!
I ultimately took a mirror and used myself as a model to at least capture some cheekbone-age. I just realized I never finished the neck! Oh my gosh, what's that black teardrop shape soul patch thingie hanging from her chin?! Too late now. Once it's on the wall, I won't take it down to fix nothing. I've got another painting on the easel now!
I wanted her mugshot clip board thing to have those slide-in letters that often look crooked and wonky. I thought that might add a bit of silliness to the piece.
And finished! If you like this lil piece, I added it to my Society6 shop! Then you too can rearrange your entire dining room to feature one painting, ha!
Lil known secret: the only reason I actually did clean and redecorate my dining room is because I hosted a lil Crafter-ween party on Friday! More details on that and what we made in an upcoming post. It's sad...but the only reason I'll clean is for company. I think that's why the hubs never argues when I say I'm hosting a Craft Night.
Oh, look, a sneak-peak of our craft night! We worked with Sculpey, one of my fave things ever. But, alas, I'm getting ahead of myself. More to come!
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