All that being said, I hacked together what kind of time lapse I could. This shows the process from poorly assembled, stock canvas, through disassembly, rebuilding and painting. We hope you enjoy it.

and then she finished it up, added a signature, and the thing is finished. In reality this took her maybe ten sessions total, which seems like working at light speed to me. I’ll have a time lapse version of all of these posted in the near future. For now, enjoy the finished product:

There’s more art to come (she did another piece the other weekend), but for now we hope you’ve enjoyed watching it come together!

Without a flash:

With a soft flash:

This second picture is a bit dim, I’m afraid. Still, you can see she’s adding in shadows and lighting effects:

Christy has been excited to work on the martini glass, especially the bright blue (Magellan) martini. The concept of painting vibrant liquids with oil paints hurts my brain a little, but even her early “sketching” is looking great.

The more she filled in, the creepier it became. The red eyes don’t help. You can start to see the effects of light she’s adding in, which I think is super cool. I tend to be somewhat astounded by the entire process.

The canvas is gessoed, so now it’s all white:

Then we finally get to some color as Christy adds the first layer of paint. She uses oil paints, which have some neat colors and textures.

And by the end of her painting session, you can see she’s already painted the basis for most of the portrait. Since we’ve come to the interesting part, I’m upping the size of the photos. As always, click on them for higher resolution:

Can we guess the subject? Christy and I ended up decided to do this project (documenting the painting step-by-step) before she’d decided what her next painting was going to be about, so this was kind of a fun coincidence. I’m always fascinated by watching her paintings and other art progress. Each stage is full of interesting details, and the process of a whole is fun to watch.

As you can see, we’ve gone from maybe two dozen staples total to more than two dozen per side. The canvas is stretched much more tightly and attached much more firmly in this version.

It really is stretched pretty tight, which is kind of fun to drum on. Flipping it over we see a new beginning! A blank canvas she’ll actually use:

That’s it for this week. While there has been a request for me to model in a sequined dress, it was decided that unimaginable horror did not need to be added to this blog. You can thank me later for preserving your sanity. Next week things get more exciting and color is actually added!

The first picture is the canvas. She bought this Artist & Craftsman Supply a few weeks back. Unfortunately they only carry one brand of stretched canvas (Apollon) and it just didn’t look that great. Still, Christy had some extra canvas hanging around, so if it wasn’t great quality at least she could use the frame.

The pictures are on flickr, so click on them for a larger version.

Here’s the newly purchased stretched canvas on her aisle:

You may not be surprised to learn that Apollon stretched canvases are, upon closer inspection, not that great. Christy uses oil paints and the canvas was only attached with a few (twenty? that’s not much for an 18″x18″ canvas) staples, so she was worried it would sag. Combined with her inherent distrust of pre-gessoed (basically primed) canvases, and she decided to toss the canvas and stretch and attach her own canvas on the frame. So here’s the second picture, the frame:

The pictures will get more exciting, but we’re going to start slow.