I painted a painting last night.
It's one of those that's kinda abstract, but at the same time it's really realistic.
What you do is you put a big picture of yourself (I used my actor's headshot) under a piece of glass. You paint the highlighted parts of your face with white, and the dark parts with another bold color (something like hot pink or cobalt blue--I was being safe this time and used brown). It's okay to paint over the parts already painted, because at the end you turn it around and you don't see the layers. Then you mix the two colors together to make something a little lighter than the original color, and paint the almost-darkest spots. After that dries, you put more white into THAT color to make almost white, and you paint that over the whole thing to fill in the missing parts, which should be the parts that were somewhat lighted. After that dries, you CAN paint over the whole thing again with the darkest color just to make sure the coat's thick enough that everything's covered.
Then you're done! You take your painting (if you're still calm after painting a painting and not knowing what it looks like) wait until everything dries. Or you could do what I did and take the painting by the edges and hold it up and look at it through a mirror... it's quite amazing.
When I showed it to my dad, he didn't believe that I had painted it. He looked at me with a weird look and said, "Now how did you REALLY do it?" so I had to take him into my room and explain the whole process using the original picture.
