Cracky-chan work in progress
To see all posts on this painting look at the cracky chan category.
The girl in the photo below is referred to as Cracky-Chan…she’s a kind of internet meme that was/is famous/infamous on various imageboards and such, particularly on an imageboard called 4chan. I thought she would be great to paint, what with the red nose and ears and expression and such, and I like the idea of taking people you would not expect to see on someone’s wall and putting them in a “serious” oil painting…I want to paint people like Darby Crash, Edmund Blackadder, etc, in a kind of old-school way that looks like a painting that would hang in an old castle or creepy mansion. I’m constantly watching these British shows set in crazy manor houses and they always have amazing dark portraits all over the walls…I love that. I want my house to be filled with crazy oil portraits glaring and staring down from the peeling wallpaper.
Anyway…this has been a tough one but I’m learning a ton! I think noses are hard to paint normally, and this one is all red and complicated, and the reference photo I used is all crappy and small and hard to see wtf is going on.
I wanted this to look kinda old school, and did a lot of looking at it with blurred eyes and such as I painted it to get the overall lighting and tone down correctly. I’ve taken a bunch of artistic liberties, partly to match the feel I want and partly cuz I can’t see wtf is going on in the photo. I saw some other pictures of the chick and she has blue eyes, at first I painted them brown based on the ref photo!
The necklace was inpired by stuff from the incredible Ghent Altarpiece, one of my favorite paintings. I hope to see it this Fall on a trip to Europe.
The background is chromatic black, I mixed pretty much equal parts french ultramarine and raw umber, with a smidge of titanium white. The reds are cad red light, alz crimson, maybe some vermillion, and the shadows are raw umber with some alz crimson. I had never painted gold before, I looked a lot at the Ghent stuff, I used tit. white, yellow ochre, raw and burnt umber. I tried to use some golden present-type bows and ribbons to figure out what it should look like but it didn’t help much. I read something elsewhere online about feeling the weight and coldness of the metal as you painted, I thought that was cool. Another tip I read was that metal should have a hard edge or the brain does not interpret it as such…makes sense!
Ignore the hair…I’m gonna fix that later. I want to finish the face first and then tackle that part, which I’m not sure how to handle yet. If you look at the reference photo you’ll see what I mean…painting the hair from that photo would be tough I think.
Here’s the photo of “cracky-chan” this was based on:
And here’s my work in progress (detail). There’s a lot of junk that needs to be cleaned up and such, needs some eyebrows, etc =), but overall I am very excited about it:
(Update: Eww I had to delete this old version of my painting, it looked too crappy to leave it up on the internets (:-B)
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