A Regal Family Portrait

This 8x10 in. portrait was created with watercolor and colored pencil. It is a piece commissioned by my sister to be given as a gift to our mother.

This is one of my favorite paintings. Not because I'm a huge fan of working in realism, but because this is an example of a time I made a mistake and decided to persevere and do my best to fix it. Watercolor is a famously unforgiving medium, and while working on this piece I mistakenly mixed a color that was much darker than I anticipated and put it on my mother's cheeks. I was so upset! I felt like she looked like a character out of Oblivion.

So, I took a step back and tried to think about my options. Yes, I could start over, but I'd already poured hours of work into it and felt it otherwise looked great. Instead, I opted to work with gouache and colored pencil to gently bring the face back from the brink. An extra hurdle presented itself when I realized that my previous attempts to lift the paint had shredded the surface of my paper a little bit, so I had to proceed cautiously and work as gently as possible.

I kept chipping away, and now you can barely tell the difference! I was so proud of myself for pushing through and trying to make the most of a bad situation. It taught me a lot about not flying off the handle and giving up at the first sign of trouble.