When the paintings of my grandkittehs turned out so well, I thought, well, maybe I should try to get even more photorealistic! I mean I’ve done photorealism all my life - it’s kind of my thing.
As I create this post on my computer, the images are enlarged - the actual paintings are quite small, as you know. So, if you’re looking at this on a computer, zoom out until it looks 4x4 inches. Otherwise they aren’t very impressive, lol.
I scrolled through my photos, looking for something visually interesting that would be challenging, but with lots of room for error. When you paint or draw a portrait, small mistakes in detail can make or break a likeness. I needed a forgiving subject… and I found this pic I took of the inside of my furnace. It was complicated, intricate, and colorful - and honestly I wasn’t sure if I could do it.
But I did. It took a while - several sessions, hunched over this tiny little 4x4 inch canvas, teeny-tiny detail paintbrushes, looking back and forth from my phone to the painting. There are plenty of mistakes, but they are not obvious. Which is exactly what I needed.
This next piece is a pile of clothes on the floor. The bright blues against the black caught my eye - and there was enough detail to make it a good challenge. I had no idea if I would be able to render the denim - and while I was working on it, it seemed like a hot mess. When doing photorealism, you look so closely at one little spot at a time until you don’t see it as the object you are painting, but rather it becomes just shape and color that you are replicating bit by bit. Then you step back, and if you are lucky, it looks like what you wanted it to look like. Every time I look at this painting I am frankly astonished at how well it came out.
And last in this series, boot prints in the snow on my gravel driveway. Of these three, this was the most difficult. Snow is hard enough to depict, but to have it be ‘old’ snow, packed by feet into the gravel and dirt - I really wasn’t sure I could pull it off. Again, I was pleasantly surprised. Again, please zoom out.
Here is how they appear hanging together in my lil trailer.
I have not done any more paintings like these - I enjoyed doing them very much, but these days I prefer landscapes. So these exist as reminders of another time of my life.
And I am so glad that I gave it a try.