Kuy, Acrylic on paper, December 2010
I set out to draw better last year, and this was one of the portraits I got to finish in time for my thank you show.
Kuy is the diminutive (i.e. pet name or lambing) for Kuya or big brother, and this painting was a Christmas gift for my one and only big bro, Paolo.
I started off with a pencil sketch, referenced off a picture that wasn’t “boring” or in a normal frontal, smiling position:
I learned from doing mom and dad’s portrait that I need not detail the sketch so much– it’s really adding the colors that demands patience.
I filled in the easiest part first– the black background!–then got to work on the fingers, which I thought would give me a hard time…
It was the pointing index finger and thumb area that took a while, but I was happy with how they came out:
The face is always tricky– even a millimeter off and you’ll have a stranger before you.
I knew if I got the eyes and lips right, I’d get to bring out my brother’s smirk… 😉
Another a lesson from my first acrylic portrait:Â blend while the paint is still wet.
Voila! I didn’t really want to go for photorealism, and chose a blurry reference picture on purpose.
At this point I knew my work was done: My brother “came out of the painting”, said hello, and smirked his trademark smirk. 🙂
