Sister Friends

Sister Friends40 x 30
a recap of this painting

Inspiration
One of my paintings from the "sister" series was my inspiration

 Preliminary sketch on the cello wrapping.

 Canvas prep and sketch

Started painting with the first face on the left.

I remember the struggle as it had been two months since I picked up a brush.

Added collage with two tissue patterns and one napkin.

So far, I pretty much was following the original sketch except for some changes in the hands.

And then I could not love the napkin that I used in the center girl. The lines just never set well with me. 

I also knew that the girl in the back would be repainted. 

Never loved her.

At some point, I sunk into the notion that this painting was going to take me a long time and I got comfortable with that knowing there was much for me to learn. 

That was the permission to keep changing stuff.

One of the things I did not like about the girl in the back her face was too small. You can see in the above two photos that I did manage to enlarge her enough to be happy with her. Adding the crown hair did help with the too small problem.

I really liked the center girl's headdress while it was in white. I toyed with the idea of her being different in that way but knew the white headdress would be too different. 

She is the focal (in my opinion) and the white headdress inspired the white flowers. 

This painting took me over a month to paint and I want to share some things I learned, if I can.

• I always knew this painting was about hands and they would be connected like the inspiration piece. I learned that I could cling to that inspiration and still change anything else.
• One of the first things I learned was how helpful it was to do a quick preliminary sketch on the cello wrapping. This was helpful with the placement of five faces because the canvas was so large. 
• About using tissue paper and napkins: Tearing the tissue before gluing it down forces me to repaint over the tissue.  Thereby, making it my design. 
• I don't like stripes or lines.
• The scale of the torn/cut tissues informs the size of the flowers.
• It is helpful to have the tissue collage in the background because you don't have to apply paint everywhere as you would with a black canvas. I like that.
• I learned to paint these flowers.
• I used Matisse Background paints and learned to paint the faces with them as well as hands, flowers and the background. I don't know why it never occurred to me that I would do that. I purchased seven more colors last weekend just in time to finish the painting. 
• I discovered how to distress by scrapping some of the white paper doily off and was so happy with that result. 
• Hands don't have to be perfect.
• Changing the scale of the flowers from head to head, as well as, limiting a few of the flowers to only one girl kept them separate. I worried that it would look like all the same gob of flowers across the canvas.
• The white of their dresses balanced well with the flowers. That was a concern. I knew from the beginning the dresses would be white so the connecting ribbon would be very visible.
• There were days and days that I did not paint. there were days I painted when I did not want to. There were days I wanted to paint but didn't or couldn't and then in the end, I wanted to paint until it was finished.  I think if I had painted this from beginning to end in a few days or hours, the flow of painting the very next thing I know to paint from impulse to impulse would have been different and therefore the outcome would have been different.

I can't help but wonder how different. For more 
♥
For more of the progression of this painting, the previous 12 post were about this one painting.