Gwenn Seemel is an Oregon based portrait artist with an unusual technique. her colorful portrait images are built up from a series of cross hatch strokes in acrylic, a process she developed from an interest in printmaking.
As you can see from the demo on this page, she starts with areas of color shapes, often with a modernist, geometric feel that often carries through to the final piece, and works up the surface gradually with several passes of hatching and shape delineation.
The end result is often a very graphic surface of multiple marks, a textural array of colors that blend to form the portrait image, as in the detail image above, bottom.
Seemel works from digital photos taken during an hour long interview process in which she asks the subject to talk about themselves.
The image above, top right is a self-portrait.
[Suggestion courtesy of Karin Jurick]
There’s a lady here in Montana that does something similar with animals. She’s married to a rancher, and got started doing it with oil-based markers meant for ear tags.
looking forward to her show coming up next week