Kekoa Paki Arts

By Kekoa Paki

Hello reader,

I’ve spent the last month or so preparing for an art fair I was going to by painting a lot of portraits in a fairly short amount of time. I plan to make two blog posts about the fair; this one, in which I will detail how I prepared for the event, and another in a week, which will describe how the event itself went.

I had done a few paintings in a strict time limit a year or two ago, but that was mostly for fun. This time, I was practicing to get to a point where I was competent enough to paint many people in a very short amount of time. Thus, there was a bit more rush with this series.

I started this quest by painting a few public figures I knew about. Mostly streamers and youtubers whom I watched.

One problem I ran into fairly quickly was drawing women. I noticed how my portraits of women didn’t look as good to me as my paintings of men. I tried painting women the same way a few times before realizing that my problem was a lack of structure in their faces. What I found I needed to do was paint the planes of the womens’ faces first before painting in the color.

Another problem I ran into was making decisions about how stylized I wanted the colors of the portraits to be. I was really happy with how portrait number 6 turned out because of how unified the warm orange color palette was, and I was somewhat disappointed with how the next few paintings’ colors felt to me. I haven’t resolved this issue yet, but I’m thinking of making a few more portraits in the watcher series to contemplate how I want to use color in my portraiture.

To end this post, I’m going to display all the portraits I made while preparing for the Youth Arts Festival.

Thank you for reading this blog post.