Annie Oakley (1 Viewer)

[whdamon]

Last August, Annie Oakley celebrated her 160th birthday. This inspired me to go into my gallery and look at a Bas Relief I painted of her likeness about 4 years ago.
It currently hangs in the stair case going down to my office/studio sanctum.
Find below a sequence of how this piece came together.

The sculpt was done by Richard Odell and was a joy to paint. It appeared to based on a number of photographs of Little sure shot.
the photos below are from his process of creation of the raw casting of a Western Girl






And off to to be cast and packaged



It was at this stage I was fortunate enough to obtain the relief and got out my brushes and paint

 

[whdamon]

My first step was to mount the relief in a butter tub lid. so I had a good grip on the subject with out getting paint all over my hands or rubbing
any paint off. The plan was to undercoat in acrylics and then glaze over with artist oils.

I usually start with the face as seen below and then its off to the in process shelf to join the others in various stages of completion.
I find it easier to paint more than one figure at a time incase I run into a technical difficulty and need time to think or research a solution. Unfortunately some pieces
in process find it suspicious when a new subject appears, especially one with a nick name of Little Sure Shot.




As the acrylic paint went on I ran into my first difficulty. The medal around her neck. I couldn't find any very clear, detailed photographs
of the medal. It turns out that Annie had her medals all melted down in support of a metal collection drive during WWI and photographic
documentation on this specific medal was not within my research capability.
Best I could do was the following photograph, and even this in a blown up state failed to provide the detail. I was going to have to fake it the best I could



The multiple layering of acrylics to provide a varying array of undercoating values continued. In the next photograph one can see
the white that formed the highlights of the face prior to the application of the artist oils finish coat



And finally the finished piece all framed and ready to be hung. Hope you enjoyed following the process