02/12/2026
Oh my, oh my, just SO . MUCH . FUN!! The Nassau Art at the Callahan Depot the weekend of Jan 29-31 was graced by some exceptionally good youth artwork, in addition to the usual adult entries, but my favorites were some high school students' self-portraits done in monochrome--first place winner is shown here. I was totally impressed with the quality of the work, and I was inspired to try yet again and not give up, as this is something I really DO want to get better at!
Soooo, I went hunting for ideas on monochromatic approach, downloaded a little phone app that helped me edit a reference photo to something that feels less intimidating than the original photo, and... here is my first attempt. It still has problems (as usual🫤) with perfection of the eye shapes, but this is the closest I've gotten to the goal of a really good likeness, IMHO.
The essence of the approach is to lay down a light wash of color and let it dry; lay down the mid tones of color and let dry; finish with the darkest shadows and let dry; fine tune with a smaller brush and fairly thick paint to get nice fine details. I also used fine line black markers to get very darkest "low lights" and fine eye detail. Pretty fast, and relatively simple. Hehe..."simple" is quite a subjective term, isn't it?! 😅
I bought a new pen, too--a white, water-based, multi-surface, ultra-fine tip paint pen, by "Apple Barrel", which made finishing the hair highlights a total breeze. Hope the pen has a better track record than I've seen in reviews of other white paint markers of this type.
