My Mother-in-law passed away quite suddenly the day after Christmas. Her passing was very difficult, but we were fortunate to be surrounded by family for the week to celebrate her life and grieve together.

I learned a lot about life from her, and I will miss her dearly. It isn’t fair that she was taken so early. All she wanted in life was to be a good mother and a good grandma. She succeeded phenomenally at both.

Deb endured a lot of difficulties – and passed precisely zero of them onto the people around her. The strength it took to do that is beyond my understanding. My life is better because I knew her.

I wanted to paint her portrait for my Father-in-law. The day after she passed, I went in the basement and tried my first attempt.

I am a huge fan of Eudes Correia, and Nick Runge. Eudes Correia is able to tell a story like Rockwell, but with a loose splashy style that I adore.

Nick Runge has a sculptural style that I find very interesting. I like how he seems to carve portraits into an incredible likeness-but when you look closely, he seems to accomplish it with straight ribbons of value glazed one on top of the next. It’s a brilliant style that I aspire to.

I am under no impression that I’m anywhere near as good as them, but these are the artists I aspire to. I want to learn more by studying their work, and use what I learn to improve.

So, when I set up my easel and painted Deb in the basement, wanting to do her some justice – imagine how discouraging my first attempt was.

Ok – it objectively terrible. BUT – I learned from it. i tried to be loose with my edges and that worked, but I had no intention behind when I lost an edge. The result was just a wild mess of blooms. Maybe I could have improved it if I had spent more time on it, but I wisely recognized this was a lost cause, and tossed it to try again.

The second attempt was light years better, but still no where near what I was aiming for. I went from too loose to too tight and simultaneously lost the likeness by messing up her left eye. At that point, I gave up again, and went on to the third attempt.

This third attempt was so much better than the first two that I finally had a little bit of hope. I tried to be very reserved with the thickness of the paint I used on each layer, since I thought I was getting too thick too quickly on the other attempts. This helped immensely. I also noticed that I was afraid of the way the painting looked in the intermediate stages, and instead of trusting things, I fiddled and fiddled and fiddled until I rounded the freshness that watercolor brings. This time, I tried to avoid that, and the results were a marked improvement. I also realized how important it is to be reserved and careful with those final last thin lines and darkest darks. Too much, and things start to feel dirty. Too little, and the image feels mushy.

I decided to put this aside for a bit and try again when I got home.

This time, I tried to be confident and use bold strong strokes with crisp lines. It looked like trash until I went in with the final lines at the end – which fixed a lot of issues with the image. But I wasn’t careful enough, and the red hue in the sclera made her look like someone had jabbed a finger in her eyes. Still, the hair is light years better than the third attempt – it doesn’t feel like a plastic lego helmet. This is probably because in the first three attempts I painted the hair before the face. This time, I painted them both at the same time – and discovered that this fixed the issue where the hair feels like a it came from a completely different painting. I wanted to explore more, so I tried again.

For this one, I decided to start with a blue under painting. I wasn’t sure what this would do, and I actually liked this quite a bit when it was all blue. But then I painted yellow over the blue, and it created a very pronounced green hue. When I painted a final layer of red, I kept adding more and more pigment, making it more and more muddy. So – I called it quits, and tried again.

This latest painting is finally one I am proud of. I tried to be very reserved with each layer, and didn’t fiddle too much before I got to painting the final details. This preserved some of the freshness, and helped me avoid making a muddy mess. It lacks that sculptural quality that I like in Nick Runge’s work because I softened edges a bit too much. Maybe next time I will try to keep more of the crisp edges intact.

While I still have a long way to go, I am at least glad that I kept going. I tried, and learned, and didn’t give up. As a result, I did manage to get a painting I feel proud of, and I am comfortable giving this to my Father-in-law.

I genuinely feel encouraged looking at how far I have come from that first attempt… this is a great example of my constant mantra “there’s only one way to get better… keep going.”

Here are the process photos I took while I painted – you can see how things look pretty awful in that middle stage – it takes a lot of confidence to leave things be at that point… and all too often I don’t.

So, several days later, I tried for number 4.