I was down in the basement, wondering what I should paint next. If you are oil painting and you want to paint every day, you have to have three things to work on, because every day’s work takes three days to dry.
“Hey you!” said Spunky Labia, International Toe Porn Superstar.
I had been painting a croquet ball and I was very pleased with it. It had looked quite fresh, and then I started painting the cookie tin it was sitting in, and it all went sideways. Spheres I can do, but cylinders are beyond me. Plus I’d picked the wrong color and —
“Hey!” barked Spunky.
I kept painting. “What do you need, Spunky?”
She cried out, “I am a Great Beauty. How is it you are not painting my portrait in oils?”
I shifted my attention away from the cookie tin. “Fine,” I said, “as long as you don’t expect an exact representation.”
So Spunky sat for a portrait, and I also worked from a reference photo. She didn’t talk and was very patient. After a week and a half, I was ready to show her what I’d done.
“Oh my god! Is that how you see me? My big toe. It’s so … Fat.”
She was right. I narrowed her big toe.
“Now my little toes look so …one dimensional. Make them curvier.”
I added some yellow and white highlights.Then I gave her kind of a halo.
“That’s good,” she said, “Post that on Facebook.”
Foolishly, I did, and I found there is nothing better than posting on Facebook to make you aware of what is deeply wrong with your painting. Mainly, the slope of the toes was utterly unnatural.
So then I had to rehab her two left toes, which left me with this, which will have to do:
Then she said she looked jaundiced. So I gave her a more flattering background ala Madame X.
Spunky is satisfied with that.
Gary recommends I put a water droplet on her big toe.
I have to turn it toward the wall or I’ll start adding a reflected blue to her feet.