Before I went there, I had a look at the photo of the painting that I took and compared it to the original photo. It was easier now, after a week, to see what was right and what wasn’t. Moreover, looking at the painting in a smaller scale is often helpful, since during most of the painting process you look at it very closely. Sometimes you need to take a look from afar. I took notes about what needed to be corrected.

The overall facial shape was a little off and the eyes were too high, and consequently the forehead was a tad too small. The nose didn’t tilt in the right direction, the same for the mouth. So I had to paint over much of the face with the base color, white with a touch of citron yellow.

This can be very intimidating if you have managed to paint those details very well before. You may feel unsure whether you can recreate them as well as previously. But I decided it’s much more annoying to have the main features of a face off even if the details are right, than have the main features right and then get the details right again. I’m quite confident in my ability to get the same look again, as long as it is done at the right time during the drying process.

I was right to trust myself on this: I think the result is much softer with the second layer of color on the large areas of the skin. I changed the background color to black to have the face pop out more. Using the white-yellow, I altered the shape of the hairline and the jaws; moved the nose a bit lower and tilting to the right; moved the eyes and eyebrows quite a bit lower; added highlights according to the original photo; and evened out the skin overall so that the brush strokes wouldn’t be so visible.

After I’d made the basic changes, I just started again with the sharp details on the mouth, nose and eyes. I tried to add more texture to the hair and beard with lighter blue. I used a hint of black on the eyes.

So what remains to be done? I’m not quite satisfied with the eyebrows – their shape isn’t quite right, mostly because the model’s real eyebrows aren’t as dark as here. It’s tricky to paint hair because it has to be uneven. And I’m not willing to start painting individual hairs.

The beard isn’t quite the right shape either, but it’s difficult to tell because the original photo had burnt-out white parts on it. As usual, the nose doesn’t look quite realistic: in photos the nose is in the light and doesn’t have much sharp definition by shadows.

I will definitely paint the eyes more, sharpen the lines and brighten the color.

Other than that, I have a feeling that this painting is close to finish. Beyond a certain point, it’s no help to continue – quite the opposite, I often do more harm than good if I stick with the same painting for too long.

Anyway. It’s an atelier course, i.e. we can just go in at any time between 10 am and 3 pm and use the facilities there. It’s a 3 minute walk for me as usual and 5 hours feels very luxurious. Today I stayed for 3,5 hours, which is quite optimal for one sitting. There is no teacher available, but that means the course is only 22€ (-50% off  for unemployed persons!), so it’s not a huge deal. Of course it would be great to get feedback from a professional, simply another set of eyes and another opinion.

But I have been painting on my own up to last year when I took up my first ever painting class, so I don’t desperately need support. I learned lots of things over the last year and now I know better what to pay attention to. I am more aware of my strengths and weaknesses.

I’ve had my painting topic in mind for a couple weeks now. I wanted to paint @UncleEnsio‘s portrait, so I took some photos one morning (might have been more than a hundred but let’s not go into too much detail) and I got a couple good shots for painting. And can I just say that he’s got a very inspirational mouth to paint, but difficult eyes and jaws and chin.

Here’s what I did so far:

This is after the first coat of paint: yellow with white to start building the base, and some prussian blue on hair and beard and eyes. First I started of course by sketching the face with charcoal to get a feel of the proportions and details. I had painted over the canvas cardboard beforehand months ago with some leftover paint, so it was very dry and ready to be painted on.

And below is after I started paying more attention to the eyes and mouth. I always debate with myself at first as to whether I should start with dark or light colors. Do I outline the features with a dark color in detail first, or give the face flesh and light with white, then go into detail? I usually start with dark, because I like to get the general look of a person right from the get-go, the eyes in particular. It’s inspiring if there’s some resemblance already that you can then keep fine-tuning.

Then again, there’s a technique called drybrush, especially with white, which means that you add a lot of light color to form a basis to build on. White underneath gives a really nice sense of 3d to a painting. But highlights are my weak point: I have a hard time looking at the painting simply in terms of light and shadow, without letting the details cloud my vision.

It is also difficult to paint evenly all those larger, smooth areas on a face: forehead, cheeks and chin. The brush strokes will eventually disappear when there are several coats of paint, but it still matters where and how much you apply white. Not to mention the nose: if the lighting of the original picture is very diffused, there may be hardly any shadows so the hues have to be used very carefully to give form to the nose.

It feels like I worked on this beanie for an eternity, hence the ingenious name The Eternity Beanie (TEB for short). In actual fact, however, I started it before Christmas, went on until about 90% and then stopped. I got hit hard by the Terror of Finishing a Work and Realizing the Yarn Will Run Out (or TFWRYWRO for short; a devastating, mind-affecting condition documented in various medical publications).

So in the end, I probably worked on it only for a month at best, since I finished it in like two hours. I was ecstatic when I realized I won’t even run out of yarn – there is still at least one meter left. I’m truly pleased with this beanie, as I’ve always wanted this kind of slouchy beanie. I couldn’t find a good one in stores, so I had to make one.

The pattern is called the Sockhead Hat by Bohoknits. It only requires 100g of sock yarn, so I thought my two skeins of 50g Teetee Pallas yarn would be perfect. I fell in love with this beautiful variegated yarn and I think it suits the beanie perfectly. The pattern was very easy for a beginner knitter such as myself, so I strongly encourage any other beginners out there to start with this pattern. I only dropped one stitch and my decreases didn’t go all wonky. Yay me.

They’re huge! They’re shapeless! They’re absolutely ridiculous!

I laughed out loud when I finished the first one. I can’t wait to see the expression on my dad’s face when he uncovers these. I bet he’ll need a minute or maybe ten to figure out what they are.

Good thing though, I used nearly three 150g skeins of Novita 7 veljestä on these slippers, yarn which I didn’t have any other use for. I think the mismatched colours go well with the general ridiculousness of these slippers.

If for some completely strange reason you now feel the urge to make a pair of your own, I used the pattern by Gabriela Ordenes, Peter Pan’s slippers. They were easy and fairly quick to make, one of those brainless-projects-for-watching-tv.

In other news, my yarns are even better organized now, thanks to Deniselle‘s generous gift of these pretty canvas bags:

She got these by attending some religious happenings or events. The black one has a slogan which has the idea that people have even chances of finding happiness. (I’ll get a better translation as soon as Deniselle wakes up, she’s a better translator than I am.) And the white one on the right has a cool drawing of a church from Leppävirta, with the slogan “strength from the stream of mercy” (again, horrible translation).

Aren’t they really cool? Deniselle asked me if I wanted them on the spur of a moment and was surprised and amused that I jumped at the chance. I had been wanting some canvas bags for my yarn, and I got these for free, with pictures and text too!

I’m a very unreligious person, but I think for that reason it’s wonderfully random and funny to have religious yarn bags. Amen.

The pattern is very simple and allows for brainless tv-knitting, yet it creates this nice ribbing effect.

Puro is 100% wool, loosely spun plies, so it feels soft and warm. Some of the colour choices are quite weird and not really my cup of tea, so I had no other choice but Revontulet. Even so, I wish there were more yellow and orange and less red and blue. My ultimate dream would be to find yarn that only had yellow and orange, changing softly as in Puro! One can always wish… Another problem was that I had to use two different colour batches for the 4 skeins, but I don’t really mind it so much.

I also like the blue/green/pink Tundra, but I don’t have any ideas what I’d do with it. Puro is quite expensive and I already have more yarn than I can knit or crochet in the near future. If only I was richer, I’d fill my small apartment with much more yarn. Maybe it’s a good thing I’m not rich.

I had a slight problem with the skeins escaping my yarn bag, so I got a brilliant idea. I stuffed my souvenir conference bags with yarn and hung them up on show!

That’s my old yarn bag, still full after delegating some of it into the conference bags. I like the Liverpool conference bag  (from Corpus Linguistics 2009) with the grey, white and purple. And here’s my ICEHL conference bag from summer 2008:

I realized I should have more hooks on my walls. Anyway, now I can have my souvenirs out from the dark closet so I can look at them more often and they’re useful too!

Right now I’m crocheting another scarf in the Skunk-Punk style with three different light blue yarns for my cousin, because my mittens turned so ugly and she likes blue more than I do. I also started on another knitting project, the Heelhead Scarf, with the result that I can now knit cables without an auxiliary needle!

I’m so happy to learn new things with every project. On the one hand, I like having a brainless project which I can work on while watching tv, but on the other hand, I don’t want to repeat something I’ve already done before. The skunk-punk blue scarf has been boring because of that, and I wouldn’t have gotten it this far without tv! There’s my justification for having more than one project under way at a time – you can always do something, depending on how you feel at a given moment.

I’m very happy with how it turned out! It’s very soft and warm and thick. For a while now I’ve been yearning for a black-and-white style in my clothes, so I figured this would be a good way to start. I call it the Skunk-Punk scarf because skunks are black and white, and black and white stripes are part of the punk style. (Something I learned from Avril Lavigne.)

The yarns I used were Novita Kaarna and Novita Marjukka, both off production by now (couldn’t even find a decent link to Marjukka), so they were on sale. Kaarna is 50% wool and 50% acrylic, Marjukka 100% acrylic, hence the softness. Plus Kaarna is superbulky and I’ve grown quite fond of bulky yarn. It makes for a very fast project if you need something quick. And I did, since none of my scarves seemed to work with my new winter jacket and its generously opening neck.

I was so proud of myself when I came up with the “technique” for this scarf. It shows I’ve understood the basics of crochet and I can perhaps experiment and improvise more in the future. It’s very simple and obvious: start with a loooong chain of chain crochet stitches, then continue with single crochet stitches and leave fringes at both ends. I know that’s super simple but it was a revelation for me, the n00b crochetress.

I also got this Estonian yarn from Obiskus as a belated birthday present:

It’s Artistic (or similar) by Aade Lõng, an Estonian manufacturer. It’s 100% wool in three colours: fuchsia, burgundy and light purple. The colours don’t change very quickly along the length, so it will be interesting to see what it looks like on a finished project. There’s 250 grams of it!

I have been brainstorming about what I’m going to make from it. It’s a little coarse, so it wouldn’t be nice to spend a lot of time on something I’m going to wear close to my skin and not be able to wear it because of itching. Well, maybe I’ll just knit a gauge patch to get a sense of how it feels against skin.

It’s so, so hard. I used to think drawing with a mouse was hard, but using the Wacom tablet pen is like a whole another level of hardness.

Ok, I’m prone to not a little hyperbole. But still, it’s like when you’re learning to ride a bike, or learning to walk. Wobbly and out of control. Or maybe it’s my hands, or my eye-hand coordination.

This is my first attempt at doodling. It’s a fine example of my painting technique with oils. I go brushing around quite quickly at first, without correcting anything until later. I don’t even feel like I need the Undo function, or the Eraser. I’m painting! You don’t get a second chance! That’s part of the fun!

(You may click to enlarge if you so wish, but it doesn’t get any better than this)

But I’m sure I’ll learn soon enough the decadent ways of Ps. It will certainly be easier and faster to show off my lame pictures when I’m drawing them on my laptop.

I never used Ps before. There are so many possibilities, and I don’t know what half of them will do – even when I try them out! I need Photoshop for Dummies.

Usually it’s just your run-of-the-mill url floods or simply some completely incomprehensible drivel. But some of them are deceptively believable.

Check this one out:

How soon will you update your blog? I’m interested in reading some more information on this issue.

Aww, interested are you? Too bad that the post in question introduced my blogroll, so I don’t see how you could call that one single issue. Spam!

Great post! I’ll subscribe right now wth my feedreader software!

Oh kewl! You’re like, using feedreader software! I’m also using feedreader software! I love saying feedreader software because it’s so clumsy!

The best information i have found exactly here. Keep going Thank you

This was for my Joker clown post. Clearly, information on the Joker and clowns is in high demand these days. Thank you back, I will keep going.

I really liked this post. Can I copy it to my site? Thank you in advance.

I’m flattered that you want to copy my first post ever, where I simply introduce my plans regarding the blog. But I can totally see how that can be instantly likeable.

Can anyone tell me who the hot brunette is that may be a new cast member on Stargate Atlantis?

http://www.koldcast.tv/video/2384

Sorry, first of all I’m not anyone, and secondly I don’t follow up on Stargate Atlantis.

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My favourite, however, has to be this one:

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So wonderfully postmodern! Sweet and innocent spam poetry! My heart melted at this.

Unseal known demeanour.

It’s a badge strange to send for the enjoyable misery of that

self-dissected, approaching roomie

Viagra on line!

Rapidly at an end of the hinterlands,

ling confabulation folio destroys the unsuitable purely seemliness

on the correctly-modulated —

mete out.

Beautiful, isn’t it? A couple of grammar errors here and there, so I added definite articles and 3rd person suffixes. I’m so touched by this lovely poem. Keep them coming!