“Afternoon Nap” - Acrylic Painting of Mother and Child

“Afternoon Nap” (acrylic on paper, 45 × 60 cm)

This painting is part of a series entitled "Fear/Love" which explores conflicting emotions and plays with darkness and light. Since I enjoy reading about the process behind art, I've started this blog to share the process behind my own work, beginning with this portrait.

I was inspired to create this painting after trying to explain what motherhood is like to my childfree friends. No matter what I said, it felt inadequate. No words could describe the depth of emotion, or how the worst experiences could also be laced with wonder and happiness.

In this portrait, I tried to capture that duality of motherhood, the exhaustion and stress as well as the transcendent joy and love. I used a selfie from years ago as a reference, back when my daughter was a baby and slept best when I cradled her, either in a carrier or my arms.

Reference photo for “Afternoon Nap”

We spent thousands of hours like this, since I often had migraines and needed to rest anyway. During those naps, I was so sick and weary, yet full of peace and warmth, a contrast of emotions that's hard to describe but hopefully captured in the painting.

The Process

When I first began working on “Afternoon Nap,” I felt nervous since I'd never painted a personal portrait before, and I wanted to do it well. That's partly why I chose it; I'm drawn to subjects that intimidate me because they teach me the most.

I had to shake off that anxiety somehow, or else my brush strokes would be fearful instead of free. To help with that, I started with a “warm-up” painting, just the underlying color (a creamy yellow) and a rough sketch of the expression and emotion I wanted to capture.

I paid particular attention to the emotional quality of the painting because, when nervous, I tend to get bogged down by trivial details. Sketching the emotion helped to minimize that and create a solid foundation for the rest of the painting.

From there, I worked on capturing the softness and shading of the baby's face. I wanted to work through the hardest part - the part I was most intimidated by - so my body would relax and create a loose, flowing background.

I spent a lot of time adjusting and readjusting the colors of the face, knowing they'd influence how I painted the mother later. I wanted a high contrast between light and dark, warm and cool, like contrasting emotions. Getting that balance was tricky, but with trial and error, I landed on something I liked.

With the most intimidating parts of the painting done, I had fun with the dark background. I loved how the black paint influenced the portrait, making it glow.

For subtle differences in shading, I mixed blue with black or watered down the paint, creating transparency and letting the underlying yellow show through. 

Then I did the baby's hand and the mother's face, creating softness over the rough sketch.

I tried keeping the mother's face relatively light at first, since so much of the painting was already dark. But in fact, the face had more shape and warmth when I later darkened the lower half.

The final step was the mother's hair and baby's clothes. Though the pajamas originally had stripes, I left them plain to emphasize the shading and create a sense of flow.

I enjoyed doing the hair immensely, again creating subtle differences in shading by adding red or leaving the paint transparent. The light curls beside the face are one of my favorite parts of the painting. They mark the point when I felt so pleased, my brush strokes were becoming too relaxed and careless. I had to stop myself from accidentally painting over the light streaks.

At that point, I decided to stop. Every stroke was as likely to do damage as improve the painting. Reaching that relaxed state with this portrait was very satisfying - a transformation in itself from fear to love.