Study of Frida Kahlo - A Portrait in Oil

Underpainting for Portrait of Frida Kahlo - unfinished

Last night I started two underpaintings. My intention was to work on finishing the Cheetah Girl Portrait, but the layers weren't dry enough to add new color. I didn't want to muck up the work I had alredy done on it, so I decided to start a new underpainting. I actually started *two* of them, but the one I'm going to talk about in this post is the Frida Kahlo portrait.

I would rather be creative in my work than realistic, but I'm not sure how to do that yet. I think that if I wait around until I get a good idea, nothing will get done - so in the meantime, I'm going to just study Frida Kahlo's face.

In my own personal opinion, Frida Kahlo was a beautiful woman. She wasn't attractive by the standards that society set for women, (to *me* she was) but her spirit and transparency made her rare. She was unique in her art, beliefs, dress and physical appearance. I've decided to try to capture her real features in this underpainting. The photo that I'm using as a reference is a black and white picture of her that I found in a music video. I hope that when the underpainting dries and I'm ready to glaze on the colors, I'll have that spark of creativity that I've been waiting for. I hope that what I learn in this study will help me to preserve the likeliness of the subjects that I choose to interpret in the future.