unsaid things

I'm a great fan of your portraits, and I look to you to learn how. So I can't be critical, I can only verbalize my appreciation.

You appear to me to have taken to extremes how watercolor tends to differ from oils. Oil paintings tend to be equally detailed over the entire canvas, but perhaps because paper is cheaper than canvas watercolorists often render some parts of a picture in much more detail than others. You tend to define your subject almost entirely through fine detail in the features, then you satisfy peripheral vision through increasingly wild and delicious frolics of line and color over a large area. I think this is a masterful use of the possibilities of the watercolor medium.

I would like to see, in your videos, what reference you start with. Are you working from a model or a photo? How much of the background are you reproducing? How big a jump are you making from original reference to your painting? I see you do start with a simple faint pencil sketch. Have you also made a few small sketches to work out colors or treatments? In your video you began with one eye, rendering it almost completely. By starting thus you essentially define the entire painting, since the rest of the portrait must follow that style, except for the peripheral styling. Are you restricting your choice in the development of the picture by completing one feature first, or can you from experience make the necessary choices in technique before you start? How long have you been painting portraits in watercolor?

Your sketchbook is astonishing. Are those really successive pages in a bound sketchbook? Your ability to render whatever you see in watercolor is breathtaking.

I admire how boldly you use black and gray, as a color in itself. This gives pictures like this tremendous tonal range.