I’ve had a couple of people request to see more of my work. I’m happy to oblige! And since it’s Mother’s Day this weekend, I thought, what could be more perfect than to share the progression of a painting of mother and son?

From my Gallery Goers ongoing series, this painting shows a mother and son in an intimate huddle, facing away from the painting on the wall. What is it they’re looking at so intently on the boy’s phone? Is it an image of the painting behind them or one of the many Miró paintings in the room? I like to think so. For me, the son has said, “Mum, look at this!” And she does.

As always in this series, there’s a visual connection between the gallery goer (in this case, not a viewer of the visible painting!) and the painting on the wall. I’ll let you discover what it is 😀

So let’s get into this post!

First, the final piece. (Note: the following photos were shot with my iPhone so the details aren’t quite what they should be.) The painting is available from Peninsula Gallery.

First, let’s look at the thumbnail…which turned into two thumbnails.

As you can see, my first thumbnail shows only a portion of the figures. I decided I like the full-length pose so much that I did another thumbnail to include it. You’ll see too that I changed the boy’s shirt to a light value.

First I drew up the image on UART paper with vine charcoal. I wanted to get the placement of the figures right but I didn’t need to be too detailed with drawing them as I knew I could adjust as I went.

And then I started in with pastels!

Here’s the first layer almost done. Often I try to use the same colour to cover all the same value areas eg all the light areas are indicated with one colour etc. Here, I decided to use different colours in the different value areas. You can see in the light, I used a pale blue and a yellow while for the mid-value areas, I used some green and some ochre. And for the darks, I used black and purple. You also see that I’ve just started playing around with the next layer (see the woman’s top).

And here are more layers added. You can see that the boy’s pants, the walls, the painting itself, and the floor, still only have one layer.

In the next image, you can see a few changes:

• All the white speckles from the paper obliterated from the boy’s pants
• Their feet resituated in relation to each other
• Some work on the cast shadow below the painting
• Cast shadow added to the boy’s shirt
• And a couple of other things (can you find them??)

Now it’s time for some final tweaks. Things like:

• The position of the mother’s hands
• Grounding the figures to the floor with a slight reflection on the floor
• Some blue was added to the green in the painting (I didn’t like how flat it looked compared with the rest of the painting)
• More work on the floor.

Here are the Unison Colour pastels I used (from my set).

And here it is in black and white (along with the thumbnail) so you can see the value areas

And that’s it for this time! I’d love to hear your thoughts about this painting of mother and son!! Please do leave a comment.

Happy Mother’s Day to all you wonderful mothers out there!! And a warm heartfelt hug to those who no longer have their Mums around to tell them, in person, how much they love them. I’m lucky, I can still do that – I love you Mum!! ❤️

Until next time,

~ Gail

PS. And if you’re curious, here’s the original Miro painting: