My newest piece, Is It Cake? (2024), was a commissioned painting by a new friend in my life, Ella. She had seen Mid Morning (below) hanging in my dorm room and was left wanting for her own family portrait. More eclectic and busy than my other works, Is It Cake? blends 10 reference photos from her home - her pets, her family living room, her siblings as children, a Jane Fonda home workout tape - into one scene. It lives in her father’s house, right above her bedframe and is my first commissioned painting. As an extra thanks, Ella took me out to a ramen dinner after I delivered her painting in brown butcher paper. It was a small act, but I fondly remember the 40 minutes we spent in Ramen Kowa eating edamame and pork gyoza, swapping stories about our summers and wondering how close we might become in the years ahead of us.

A Quick Aside - What does my process look like?

I almost always start by collating reference images into one composition on Procreate, then test out different colour schemes by using a blocking technique on the app. For Is It Cake? I landed on pink and green - colours I would describe Ella by. Then comes time to prime my canvas (I always use clear or white gesso) and sketch out my composition. When priming, I use a flat wooden scraper to remove excess gesso. It’s important to prime raw canvas, since without it your canvas will absorb your paint, resulting in a loss of vibrancy and brilliance. The point of priming is to create that protective layer, and also to minimize the texture of raw canvas.

I always sketch in orange pencil, since using graphite requires fixative and makes for quite a murky line when you introduce paint. I find that orange is a neutral tone that is easily drowned out, which is good: you don’t want pencil marks to appear beneath your paint. In this case, I covered the canvas with an even light pink wash, then began the layering process to build up vibrancy and opacity. Applying thick base layers is a huge risk, because it makes your paint more prone to cracking and creates an uneven surface. The point of an underpainting is to neutralize the white gesso, since you don’t want bright white shining through your paint. Perceptible gesso is a dead giveaway of your sophistication - or lack thereof - as a painter.

I generally avoid using small round brushes, since I rely on my elbow and forearm over finicky wrist movements to direct my brushstroke. My preference is always a large flat brush, angled or straight. I spend about 20% of a work session actually painting, and the other 80% comparing marks on my canvas against my reference. This is arguably the most important part of painting - constantly checking your work against your reference. It allows you to assess in real-time how successful your imitations are.

In the latest stages of my process, I do turn to smaller brushes to fully render the most detailed parts of my paintings, using a mahl stick to steady my wrist as my fingers get to work. I always seal my paintings with two or three layers of liquin, a drying medium that protects paint from fading and cracking over time. Generally, I incorporate a small amount of an oil colour (in this case, I used a pea-sized amount of burnt umber) into my liquin before applying. I find that toning the canvas in this way helps bring all the colours together, creating cohesion in my colour scheme.