Flower Girl #4

Friday, April 29, saw my sleep-deprived self hanging the above framed painting for the “Family Guy” art show, themed The Art of the Ad. It marked the first time I had completed a traditional painting in over eight years, and the journey was certainly no cakewalk. Painting with acrylics was not as easy as I had remembered, and mistakes were made, bad enough to merit a second trip to Blick for a new canvas. Good and bad news abounded from this particular flub. The good news was that I still had time to finish the painting. The bad news was that I had to put my freelance work with Leaf Trading Cards on hold in order to do it, which, by the way, was completed yesterday and looks great. A post on that will be in order as soon as I’m given a heads-up from them to share that work on here.

My piece pays homage to a vintage advertisement on Liebig Extract of Meat, a highly-concentrated meat stock that was used to make soup in the olden days, as you can see in the comparison below:

Credit for the Liebig card belongs to Flickr user cigcardpix, whose photostream consists entirely of vintage ads of the trading card variety. According to him, the title of the card is “Liebig S133 – Flower Girls 1883 #4.” Hence, the title of my piece, “Flower Girl #4.”

Originally, I wanted Lois to figure in the painting, but as I had done a piece on her in a previous show, I decided to take the less-traveled route and use Meg instead. Both Meg, or her skin to be precise, and the Liebig jar took the longest to paint. For the finer details on the jar, I utilized Prismacolor markers, as experiments with the smallest brush I owned proved fruitless.