Today’s watercolor experiment:

I started today’s experiment with latex resist. The idea in mind was a reverse portrait with the features in white and the background, a dark color.

Mask, Latex

Then it occurred to me that I could keep the face I drew in latex and superimpose another face with paint.

I painted a stylized nose and eyebrows in yellow and orange and drew an orange line for a second mouth. I painted two more eyes about the latex ones, and painted the background with a dark (indanthrone) blue.

After removing the latex resist, I found the white spaces very distracting; the second set of eyes did not work at all. I painted the white forehead and nose spaces with a red shaded flesh tone and darkened the area above the eyes, to erase the extra eyes I had painted in. I used a dark pigment to outline the face.

At the last moment, I noticed that the orange line depicting a frontal view of a mouth could be turned into a protruding lower lip in profile. This reminded me the portraits (Abstract Mike and Me, Final Transition, Final Portrait) of my brother Mike.

Double Mask
12″x6″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor

So I am left with a double portrait of myself in full frontal view and my brother Mike in profile. I don’t know if this is readily apparent to the viewer, it is even ambiguous to me, but that hint of my older autistic, low functioning brother is there in that mask of me.