We revisit Betty Blythe with our out this week. I went with another old black and white publicity still of silent movie star, Betty Blythe, and printed it out on cheap photo paper, then painted over it with a mixed media bag of acrylic paint, water colors, inks and markers, and came up with a piece that was a little more personally satisfying than the portrait of her that I rendered in ink a couple of weeks ago. This one is less of a colorized photo and more of an impressionistic piece.

This time I blew up a tiny .jpg I found online (seen right), flopped the image and blew it up before printing it. This left it with some weird .jpeg artifacts, which I incorporated into the piece. I did a simple grid in the background, using a brush guided by a ruler. Depicting the background through the sheer material of her clothing maybe didn’t work as well as I’d hoped, but I was rushing a deadline before my fingers gave out again.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Check back in with PopCult later today on Monday because we’ll have a second post to tell you all about the new episodes of our music specialty programs debuting this afternoon on The AIR.


Discover more from PopCult

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.