I cut several squares of 20x20" in cream and white fabrics. I'm going to try a few different ways of doing this portrait of my parents and one will definitely be a "practice" square.
I took the picture I selected and started to draw my parents onto a piece of fabric. It was okay for my practice piece but it wasn't working out so well. So I decided to just make life a little easier and I bought a small projector on Amazon. I loaded the picture and within 10 minutes I had mom and dad projected on the wall onto one of my fabric squares and I was tracing an outline. I got 3 sketches done in 15 minutes and all of the proportions were right.
My first portrait was done free hand and it seriously went wrong. Sorry, dad but you turned out kinda alien like. I figured I would just use this one to practice on. Painting with coffee turned out to be quite hard. First of all, you can't just make a cup of coffee and start painting. I guess that would've been just too easy to do. In case you're wondering, the tint is barely tan. I even made about 3 cups of coffee and boiled it down to about 1/4 C and it was just a light brown color. It was much darker after the boil but it was clear that to get a really dark color, I was going to have to do multiple applications or try to boil about 6 C down to 1/2C or something. I could do that but I'm not that determined. So I figure I'll go back to the inks.
Anyway, here's my practice attempt. I used coffee on mom and colored pencil. For dad, I just used colored pencil and there's a big difference. If I use inks I'll have to remember to get rid of any hard ink lines and when using colored pencil to make sure to use nice even pressured strokes preferably in one direction. I think the inks will come in handy for the really dark areas (hair and jacket).
Since the veil, dress, tiara and the background are all white, I thought I might try to iron some tulle down and maybe find a nice lace and put that down for the dress. But that white will probably be really bright which I don't really want. It may or may not work or I'll have to tint it a little with inks or soak them in some coffee. But its just an idea I'm playing with.
Anyway, here's my practice attempt. I used coffee on mom and colored pencil. For dad, I just used colored pencil and there's a big difference. If I use inks I'll have to remember to get rid of any hard ink lines and when using colored pencil to make sure to use nice even pressured strokes preferably in one direction. I think the inks will come in handy for the really dark areas (hair and jacket).
Since the veil, dress, tiara and the background are all white, I thought I might try to iron some tulle down and maybe find a nice lace and put that down for the dress. But that white will probably be really bright which I don't really want. It may or may not work or I'll have to tint it a little with inks or soak them in some coffee. But its just an idea I'm playing with.
Mom turned out okay but not great. And you can see some really hard ink dry lines and bleeding (tiara). I think the ink/coffee should stick to general open background areas. Cotton fabric just wicks color all over the place and I really don't want to try to control it.
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