Mimi Torchia Boothby

For my last daily face, I decided to go back to the historical, where I started. I had hoped to work on making more pretty faces, but instead, life threw me a real curve ball and I didn’t have time or energy to do extras, and had to rely on my family for most of the modeling, total realism.
This has been a fun exercise,but I think that the painting a day exercise was more fun. More than once I did not paint something because I had to do a face instead.
Thanks everyone who followed me down this road this month, it has been an adventure!

This time I used a small old photo for a reference, instead of a blown up high resolution photo like I did the first time. But WHAT was the difference? Why did my mother’s face pop out at me right away with this one, yet was so frustratingly impossible to capture in the first? Simple. FLASH photography. For a good reference, you need natural lighting. Indoor, outdoor, doesn’t matter, but throwing a light directly into a face makes it easy for you to see, but VERY hard to get a good likeness.

I don’t like how this came out, only because I am trying to get a likeness, will probably try again another day. Taken from an old photograph of a happy time.

My kids are great models!! I can say freeze! and they won’t move until I tell them they can move again. Now they wouldn’t do that when they were 8 years old. Better late than never!

Yesterday I was with my family all day so I didn’t have the alone time necessary to paint. Instead, I found myself sketching everyone in sight!