A month ago I decided that I was going to paint a vampire.
The creative process started out with a sketch that looked similar, but was completely different. I'll be honest, as my second portrait I've ever painted, this was a journey. The woman above went through many different skin tones, pink, blue, violet, and at least one more before I settled on her final tone.
At one point her eyes were brown, then they became a complete mess by the time I started adding eyelashes. I ended up scraping off all the paint and starting over. When I did, I tried to give her a normal eye color (brown), but her eyes kept going milky white-blue. At one point there were so many layers of paint that I scraped her eyes off once again and redid them. The end result is that she is blind. I am not sure what it means, but I was tired of fighting after three days and finally gave into what the subconscious part of my mind wanted me to do.
The story behind the construction of her face is not so complicated. I wanted to explore the insides of a vampire, beautiful on the outside and monstrous on the inside. No matter how well she tries to dress herself up (and you can tell she cares by the style of her hair, her eye makeup, her fancy clothes) she is still a monster.
Now does she look like a traditional vampire with only one to two sets of fangs? No. But I didn't want her to follow the norm.
Now with that said, this painting created some real upheaval in my family. They started to worry something was seriously wrong with me. That I was disturbed on some level, for how could I go from drawing something sweet and innocent three weeks prior to this terrifying thing?
The answer is simple. I just wanted to paint a vampire. Really there is nothing personal about it. No big thought process. No hidden meaning. Just an exercise in practicing painting something I am passionate about.
This blog was a bit of a mess, but I haven't posted in forever and I figured it's about time I share something with you.
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