Portraiture: Captain Peter Hammarstedt

Reference photo: Simon Ager

It took me about six months, start to finish, to complete this piece. Having never undertaken the realistic drawing/painting of an actual living person before, I was exceptionally critical and cautious. In fact, it has never taken me more than a few days to a few weeks to finish a piece before this. Sure there are times when I go back months later and change someting or touch something up, but this piece literally was not completed for six months of my constantly working at it.

This, being a mixed media piece was compositionally challenging. Sometimes I would just sit and stare at it waiting for the ideas to form and the pieces to fall into place. Mostly this was a big experiment, and in the end, I'm satisfied. I was trying all these new (to me) techniques. Half of the time I had these ideas but I had no real clue if I could really do it and still pull off a good quality piece of work. I definitely did a lot of research before taking certain steps.

The most challenging part was surely adhering the watercolor portion to the wood panel. It doesn't sound too complex, but I needed to research which adhesive method I could use that would both work well, and not ruin the watercolor over time. I finally decided to use a matte medium and a brayer, which I broke trying to press down so hard. I was trying so hard not to accidently get matte medium on the brayer and run it across the watercolor piece. And then the edges would not stay down. I kept having to cram more matte medium in there with a brush and then apply pressure to each spot that popped up. So, in my research I have discovered that adhering watercolor paper to wood should be done BEFORE you actually paint!

I also wanted a very translucent look for the wave border, so that the wood grain would be visible behind the color. I used watercolor on the wood for a stained effect. I did these steps completely separate. I had two pieces going at one point as I worked on them both individually. Then I carefully cut (all. those.TINY. ship parts!) the watercolor piece away from the rest of the page. I think I held my breath for the 20 minutes it took me to do it with an exacto knife. Next, I layed it on top of the painted wood panel. I'm sure it sat like that for well over a week while I tried to decide which adhesion method I would use, and also if I was satisfied enough with it to commit it to the panel.

Ultimately I went for it, and this is the result.

The piece on the bottom where the two whales are dancing, that is a separate piece that for months was just a white circle that i didn't paint on the original paper. I had a different idea to begin with and then scrapped it, so then I was left trying to decide what to do with the blank space. I thought the images of a minke and a humpback would be fitting.

Since this piece is relatively large and heavy, 18 x 24" on a solid wood panel 3/4" thick I tried first to photograph it. I was never satisfied with any of the photos so I ended up getting a new scanner (which I loooove) and scanning it in a series of 9 scans which I then stitched together to produce the final image. I love all of the detail of a good scan and I now scan all of my work using the same method.

This piece of work taught me so much. I realized some things about my own artistic abilities, and I tried some new methods that were way beyond my comfort zone.

Art really is transformative.