Before I go into the process behind this piece, I want to explain its personal significance. This is not only number eleven of my ongoing New Orleans series, it is also a self portrait of me on Halloween dressed as the amazing Frida Kahlo, at one of my favorite bars in Nola, Sylvain. As you can see, like most of my New Orleans paintings, I started off with a very simple sketch.
The next step is a very loose block in of color, and of course I always thin the oil paint out with paint thinner for this step. At this stage I don’t really care if colors bleed into the wrong spots because frankly there aren’t any wrong spots, it can always be covered up if i feel it shoudn’t be there.
At this point I start getting more detailed with the background first then I work my way forward into the figures.
At this point I’m just plugging along on each of the figures. I hit a road block when I got to myself. If you’ve ever tried painting a self portrait, you’ll know they can be very challenging. This one in particular I was trying to find a happy medium between making it look like myself and Frida at the same time.
After a little bit of struggle and a little bit of time spent, I finally felt very happy with myself (Frida) and then moved on to finish the rest of the figures in the piece. All that was left was to finish the bottles in the foreground of the painting.
I had the idea to collage actual alcohol labels into this piece when I first started it. Luckily, with the help of some friends I was able to get some really great labels (especially the Tequila Cabeza, Thanks Dave!) I decided I didn’t want to have a label on every single bottle in the painting, I felt that would be a little overkill. I then very simply finished off the other bottles, while also keeping some of the drips from my original layer of paint visible.
