Lady Desiree

10 x 18, acrylics on watercolor board

For fun and meager profit, I used to take a day here and there to paint one of these little airbrush portraits. Sometimes I would paint them at shows. Like most fast paintings, it's hard to look back at them without feeling the itch to "finish them out," but I think they all sold long ago, so I can't scratch -- fortunately.

I usually sketched in brown acrylic and/or a brown verithin pencil, right on watercolor board -- usually hot press, liked this one, but sometimes cold. The latter imparts a lot of character when the airbrushing starts. Once I was happy with the "sketch," I would mass in some colors with acrylics (nowadays, I would probably use airbrush acrylics even for this part), for things like the hair and the band on the dress. Then I would go over it once with a medium airbrush (like an Iwata HP-C), using simple masks, often cut on the fly from paper laid over the sketch. Then came a quick finish pass with the acrylics, by hand, and I was done, all usually within a couple hours or so.

A detail is at [link]

Copyright W.J. Hodgson, all rights reserved.