No. 425: Steampunk Mary

Steampunk Mary by Tom Wills, October 2018, watercolor and ink.

"Mary" Christmas!

Do you remember the story of this vintage frame and its painstaking restoration? It's here:
http://tomwillsproductions.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-frame-as-art.html
It turns out that I had a plan for this amazing frame, all along.

This is Mary, and she likes steampunk-y things, and I think she will really dig this frame and portrait. Her husband commissioned the painting and I restored the frame specifically for this piece. Merry Christmas, Mary!

The idea here was to reproduce a favorite photograph and all of its steam-y attributes: The clothing, the pipes, the feather, the bricks, the accessories. Hubby insisted that it be full color, so a pencil sketch was out of the question -- although that's how this one started.

Ink and pencil

After the sketch was done, I added ink.  I figured I would do the darkest, most intricate parts first in ink, and then paint over them.  The permanence of the ink assured that the paints would not smudge the black lines.

Darker details of clothing, bricks and pipes penciled in.

Slowly, day by day, I added layers upon layers of color and detail. Hubby had me refine certain elements of her face and attire, and we shipped a lot of photos back and forth. He was very specific and I grew more determined to make this happen.

Painted to fit this specific, still-unrestored, vintage frame.

 

You can see the details emerging on the clothing.

Once the clothes were together, I went back and refined the arms and hands, face and pipes, jewelry and gun.

Capturing the light.

You can see how the face evolved from the first pencil and ink rendering at the very top of this blog. The painting captures the light's reflection on hirt cheeks and chin, and in her eyes.  A drawing, I must agree, would have looked too flat in this instance.

Another difficult piece for a fairly demanding client that, this time, I was able to turn into two works of art: The painting and its frame, complementing each other to produce a vintage-looking image in a frame that's 120 to 140 years old.
This is a Christmas gift that will last another century.