This painting is of the beautiful, Lucille Ball. The concept of this piece is to create a portrait of a celebrity while playing with color, line, and shape to evolve the portrait into something beyond the traditional. In this post, I will be taking you through the process and explaining my choices.
The process began with figuring out the composition using small drawings on tracing paper. You can see that these are 3 examples of the many compositions I tried. When choosing colors, I liked the effectiveness of the black, and the red and orange came from the iconic red lipstick and orange hair. Those colors were important references to her character and personality.
The arrangement I settled on is the one above where each portrait is overlapped starting from the top right corner, and ending in the bottom left. Her character was quite silly, yet in that era, women were expected to be poised which we still see in the outfits and makeup she wore. Because of this, I wanted to maintain some elegance in her portrait while also revealing the many layers she had.
In the final piece, you can see how the painting transformed. It has become much more modern and playful. I made this choice because I wanted it to appeal to the audience of today, but more importantly, it shows that despite the formal outward appearance she was quite creative and had a challenging life. When working on top of the portraits, I established depth and form between each portrait, which contributes to the painting’s liveliness and Lucille’s as well. This painting ties the elegance of Lucille Ball with the chaos she lived in and her wacky persona on TV.