1.4 Look at what you see- not what you imagine

UPM Manual: “Using A4 or A3 paper, lay an image upside down and, using ink, watercolour, gouache or acrylic, make a 10-minute copy of your image.

Do this again with another image. This time make a 20-minute copy.”

 

I have a strong emotional reaction to this image of a girl in a straight- jacket desperately reaching for a shopping bag and held back by strong hands.

This is part of an absurd advertisement for the perfume shops “Creme de la Creme”, which annoys me. But I definitely want to paint it.

I turn it upside down and get the timer ready. I am using A4 Fabriano artistico HP paper, 300 gr/m2. I start by using a pencil to draw the image. It all goes very wrong! After 13 minutes I still have the pencil in my hand trying to figure out the proportions. I press pause to prepare acrylic paints, decide this is obviously the 20 minute painting and continue timing when the palette is ready. The 7 remaining minutes are still way too little to finish. This is after 20 minutes :

I decide to start over. This time, I start by drawing a rectangle proportionate to the image on an A4 Ecoline Liquid watercolour paper and by preparing my palette with W&N Galeria Acrylic paints.

I gave myself 6 minutes for the sketch and the remaining 14 for the painting. This is the result, turned back around:

This worked way better. I would like to come back to this found image and paint it again with a different time frame.

For the 10 minute painting, I decide to choose an image with larger shapes and without a face:

I skip a pencil drawing altogether and just mark out the shapes quickly with a very diluted acrylic paint on a thin brush:

This is the painting after 10 minutes:

From this exercise, I learned that I can actually paint something in 10, 20 minutes- it doesn’t have to take a week every time 🙂

In the first example, I found it more difficult to not focus on the image as I imagine it- probably because I kept aware of the face. In the second image it was much easier to just see shapes and paint what I actually see and not what I imagine.