Painting Tonally; The Figure again

Here's a little rule of thumb–and this is just a rule of thumb, not written in stone or anything– if your center of interest is in light, keep the shadows very simple. If your center of interest is in the shadow, keep the lit areas very simple.

The sketch on the left is light dominant; all the action and subtleties happen in light, and nothing happens in shadow. The sketch on the right is shadow dominant. The good stuff happen in shadow, and the lit areas are kept very simple, devoid of any modeling.

Whether the center of interest is in light or shadow is a decision you need to make before you start the painting, and you have to stick with it. Sure, there are times when we see really interesting shapes or colors or patterns or whathaveyou both in light and shadow, but it's up to you to decide which should be dominant and which should be subordinate.

Painting Tonally; The Figure

Lost in Thought, 18 x 14 inches, oil on canvas

This painting is available. Please email me for details.

I'm posting this painting as a good example of a simple light-on-dark structure. Just like the light-on-dark carousel horse painting, the lit area is very light and the background very dark. There is very little reflected light, except where light is bouncing off of parts of the figure itself (compare cast shadow on her left thigh with the form shadow of her head, which receives no reflected light) There is virtually no ambient light. In the studio, there was actually plenty of ambient light (we had to have light so we could see our palettes and canvases) but I ignored its effects on my painting and focused solely on the primary light source.

This kind of structure typically suggests indoor lighting. When we're outside, we usually see ambient and reflected light everywhere, illuminating everything. If shadows are illuminated, they will be lighter in value, of course, and we would see lots of color in them. Indoors with a single light source, we may have a structure such as this one, where the shadows go very dark. It's not always the case, because indoors, we can control lighting however we want. I'm just talking about this particular kind of light-on-dark structure. We see this over and over throughout art history, and we have a name for it; chiaroscuro. Rembrandt. Velasquez. Goya. Da Vinci. The list goes on and on. And then the Impressionists came along and took the newly invented tubed paints outside, and suddenly everything changed....but that's another day's post.

Painting Tonally; The Figure

Tin Can Blues, 16 x 12, oil on linen

This is Mike. When the model didn't show up one night, he volunteered to sit for us. I handed him the guitar and asked him to just get comfortable. The environment was made up as I painted.

If you're new to my blog, or even if you've been following it for a while, you may be surprised to see that I actually paint things other than trees and buildings. In fact, I love painting the figure; I just don't show them.

But since we've been talking about painting tonally and moved from the landscape to urban structures to still lifes(arguable. but humor me), it seems only fitting that we talk about painting the figure.

In reality, though, painting tonally is a way of organizing the visual world, and it doesn't have anything to do with what is being painted. (Not to be confused with Tonalism with a capital T, which is an art movement where a more narrow description applies) In the context of this blog, we're talking about emphasizing value shifts, rather than hue shifts. The principle is the same if we're painting a mail box, or a figure.

Of course, painting the figure is infinitely more difficult than painting a mail box because of drawing issues, but we're not talking about that right now. I won't be opening that Pandora's box just yet.

I just want to direct your attention to a few key characteristics of this kind of tonalist painting. First, except for the blue shirt, the palette is very limited; white, yellow ochre, transparent oxide red, and black. With this set up, it's impossible to go crazy with saturation.

There's a tiny bit of prussian or ultramarine used in the blue shirt, but even so, the saturation in the blue is a perceived brightness. It's really very gray; check it out;


I saved this screen shot as a pretty big image, so you can click on it and see just how gray it is.

Secondly, note that there is a big value jump between light and shadow areas. Not only is it a big jump, but it's a definitive jump. There is no ambiguity between a lit area and a shadow area. Often (but not always) with a "colorist" approach, you would see a much closer value range between light and shadow (the shadow painted in a much higher key) and the light and shadow areas of a shared surface may be distinguished with more emphasis on hue / temperature shifts.

Which brings me to my third point; in the above painting, if you look at light and shadow of a shared surface– say the light blue of the shirt in light and dark blue of the same in shadow, or oranges and reds of the skin and the wall both in light and shadow– there isn't much, if any, hue shift. If it's in the orange hue in the light, it's in the orange hue in the shadow. Just much darker.

I'm not saying ignore the color of reflected light completely. I'm saying value first. Of course you'd see temperature shifts depending on what's illuminating the planes of the shadow side, but the value has to be spot on, or the structure will fall apart and you'll end up with choppy, fragmented image that lacks a sense of unity.

Card Player, 16 x 12 inches, oil on linen

This one is even more limited. No blue on the palette! The blue of his pants is made with ivory black + white, with a little yellow ochre and transparent red oxide mixed in for warmth. In art school, we had to do this exercise where we copy N.C. Wyeth illustrations with this limited palette. At first we were doubtful whether it can be done - I mean, look at those beautiful colors he used! To our surprise, we found this palette can come pretty close to many of Wyeth's illustrations. We couldn't get brighter blues, but even so, we came surprisingly close. I've since tried the exercise with copying Velasquez, Hals, and Sargent, and I must say, it is really helped me to put value first, and be more sensitive to subtle shifts of color because you have so little to work with.

I urge you to give it a try, especially if you find that you're having trouble with too much color and/or fragmented value structures in your paintings.

Painting Tonally; Carousel Horses

Hey, I just thought of something; pretty much everything I paint is tonal. So saying "painting tonally" in my post headings is sorta redundant.

I suppose since I started talking specifically about this way of painting, it's not so silly but now, several posts later, I'm not sure if the technical context applies anymore. Ah well. Who pays attention to post titles anyway? I don't.

So! we continue with these carousel horses, and you can think of these as very simple value structure studies. I for one, am not thinking too much about subtle color shifts with these. These are all about simple structures and manipulating paint. For example, the one above is dark-on-dark, losing edges in the shadows. Sharper edges are reserved for where lit area meets the background, and the decorative saddle stuff.



This one has a similar structure to last week's (?) post; light-on-dark. The horse itself is cooler and brighter, with fewer lost edges.



This I would call light-on-light. Because the shadow value of the horse is very close to the background, I chose to melt those areas together, losing edges completely. Then it looked like I had no dimension whatsoever, so I brought back the legs on the far side and used parts of them as opportunities to use some dark notes, which act as punctuation, if you will.



Lastly, dark-on-light. Nothing on the horse is as light as the background, so I just forced the issue and lost some edges without strict rule. "I felt like it" is the only reason why some edges are lost and some aren't.

In these studies, I'm also doing a lot of process work. That is to say, a lot of scraping, repainting, glazing, staining, some sanding... The anti-alla prima! Sometimes painting alla prima is too straightforward and I feel like I need to give myself permission to deviate. It puts me in the abstract mode, and while I don't know just what path I'm taking to get to point B, I actually like being lost and struggling to find my way. I can't really do that with deadlines looming, but when I have some time, I enjoy the ride.

Painting Tonally; Still Life (?)

Dream Horse, 9 x 12 inches, oil on linen

Am I still talking about painting tonally? I don't know. I kind of lost track. Not that I had a track to begin with. I just started babbling about painting tonally and followed where it lead. There was never an organized idea or ideas to what became a series of posts on painting tonally.

When I was working on the roller coaster paintings, I started thinking about other rides at the amusement park. The carousel has always been a metaphor-rich subject (think about it; we can't wait to get in on the action, how we fight over the limited, colorfully seductive choices, how we pretend to be having a real experience when really, we're just going up and down and around and around on a piece of painted fiberglass, listening to the same surreal soundtrack over and over, and we end up exactly where we started) and I thought the diverse positions and decorations of the horses (and other animals) would make a great series of studies.

I'm not a wildlife painter, nor am I a western painter. I know nothing about horses and have no particular feelings about them. For me to paint actual horses would be nothing more than technical exercises (albeit very challenging), because I have no emotional connection to the animal. But carousel horses give me plenty of connecting points to my own memories and emotions, and that's an important distinction.

In terms of technique, this painting seems to have a different color structure than the rollercoaster paintings. Actually, it's not that different. If I take out the blue [saddle blanket] thing, the painting sits comfortably in the same yellow-orange-red slice of the pie. The lit part of the white horse is very light against the dark background, which makes it look less tonal (a lot of "tonalist" paintings have very narrow value ranges). You can see both warm and cool shadows on the horse, but even the parts that look like cool grays are in fact in the orange realm. The blue [saddle blanket] thing is in the blue slice of the pie, but very muted. The blues look a lot more saturated than they actually are only because of the orange context. If I went farther out on the blue end of the color wheel, I would surely lose harmony.

I keep talking about the same thing over and over with each post, but this stuff can be tricky and it took me years to "get it". (Mostly because I didn't pay attention in school so I had to figure it out on my own) And now that I teach this stuff, I have come to believe that repeating the point with different examples really helps. You still have to do it yourself to really get it, but knowledge has to come first. After all, if you don't know what you're doing, you can't do it well.

In the next several posts, I'll share other carousel horse studies with different value structures~

Painting Tonally; Roller Coaster 2

Twilight Ride, 18 x 36 inches, oil on linen

Here's another roller coaster painting. This one is 18 x 36 so it's bigger than yesterday's. That means more detail. Well, scaling up doesn't necessarily mean more detail, but scaling down often means less. I wanted to be able to get that sense of density in the framework of the wooden roller coaster by layering straight lines. I of course used a straight edge to help me draw the lines; with a pencil first, then I used a mahl stick (mine is just a scrap piece of lattice wood) to guide me paint them.

I had a photo reference, but I didn't want to trace it or project it. Not because I consider that cheating, but it just seemed too tedious and daunting. I was more interested in the character of the grid work, and if I could make it look convincing without necessarily positioning each and every line accurately, that would do it for me. They're not drawn randomly, though. I did pay attention to layers of grids and where it seemed appropriate, I tried to paint the layers distinctively. (where its lit up at the top, for example)

Also to add to the believability, I made sure that the horizontal lines were not horizontal, but in perspective, with a few different vanishing points way off the canvas. Yesterday's painting doesn't have that added complexity. This one is more problematic, in that sense.

Drawing structures in perspective can be tricky, especially if the vanishing points are off the canvas. I think I could probably do a post on how to do that (without actually plotting points on the studio wall) if anyone's interested, but I'll have to set up an easy to understand visual aid so it might take a while. I'll try to remember to do it the next time I face that problem.

Here's a detail shot of the right edge of the painting. If you click on it you can see it much bigger, and you can see some of the edge play that contributes the sense of depth.

Oh yes, and someone asked me via email (don't be shy - next time, just put your questions in the comment box nobody will think your questions are stupid :-) if I changed my palette for yesterday's painting. The answer is that I still have the same colors on my palette, but I only used white, black, yellow ochre, and transparent oxide red for the most part. Plus a little help from permanent red for the sunlit tracks, and cad yellow deep on the fence. But just a little bit.

Next, we'll look at some still lifes. Well, I don't know if I can call them still lifes because they're sort of taken out of context and made up and... well. You'll see.

Painting Tonally; Roller Coaster

Dipper at Dusk, 12 x 24 inches, oil on linen

We now leave the landscape, and apply the same narrow-slice-of-pie tonalism to more urban motifs. If you've been following this blog for a while, you will recognize this recurring subject matter. I've painted a bunch of different incarnations of the roller coaster theme, and so far, most of them have been done in the yellow/orange/red slice of the pie. I just like the warm, dusky sunset light and atmosphere, the mood it creates, and the memories or emotions triggered by these moods.

This one is more or less a subjective color system. I chose the yellow/orange/red theme, and imposed it onto the motif. If it were a natural light situation, I think we'd see more reflected light. At this close distance, and with the wide open sky, we wouldn't get the darks obsucuring stuff like this. The grid work in the shadows would most likely be lighter than the dark background, (opposite of what I did) and much cooler, too.

The lighting in this painting is more like theatrical lighting. Not much reflected or ambient light at all, so if it's not lit by the primary source, it gets pretty dark.

In terms of color, I used a little bit of green (very warm, orange-y green) in the palm trees, and a tiny bit of blue - green in the low wall toward the bottom. Again, these greens and blue-greens are relative to the orange context. If you isolate them, they would look like warm grays, more or less. But these few notes create a sense of more robust color space, when in fact it's nearly monochromatic. I don't know about you, but I find this stuff fascinating. I can't get enough of experimenting in the narrow slice of pie and trying to tweak this and that to fake depictions of reality.

A friend of mine saw this painting last week and asked me how I go about painting the intricate grid work; whether I paint the background first and paint the foreground carefully - in which case how do I know if the background color I choose is going to be correct, and what happens if I mess up on the foreground? The fact is, I don't work that sequentially. I just go back and forth and slowly develop it. I do a lot of scraping and repainting, so some of the grid stuff probably has five, six, or more layers of paint on it. It's not at all efficient, but that's the only way I can get the kind of edge integrity and spontaneity in the brush work. Usually, after the initial stages I work with opaque colors but I try to keep some sense of transparency in the dark areas. If I'm darkening a broad area, I might do some glazing too. Then again, I might not. I like mixing up opaque and transparent applications and I do them purely in response to whatever needs fixing. I don't have a "method", in other words. The painting does look pretty terrible for a long time during the process but eventually, it starts pulling itself together and comes out alright. Not always, but often enough.

That's my studio approach. En plein air, I'm pretty direct and more or less a "put it down, leave it alone" style painter. After all, you only have a couple of hours and you can't glaze over a wet surface.



This painting is on its way to Atlanta, and will be available through Anne Irwin Fine Art. Please contact them if you're interested.

Painting Tonally; Green

Winter Grazing, 11 x 14 inches, oil on linen

The problem with cows is that they tend to all face the same direction, even when they're not moving. If you're not careful, they can look like they were done with a rubber stamp.... hmmm may be that's not a bad idea....

Anyway, this is, obviously, a green painting. The blue-violet delta painting was a good example of diminishing value range as we go back in space and into denser atmosphere. This painting does that too, to an extent, but it's a better example of diminishing chroma. It's the same grass in the foreground as in the background, but we can't paint it the same color, if we hope to portray a sense of atmosphere. The farther we go back, the more the color is influenced by the atmosphere, which in this case is a very light cool gray. The grass, consequently, becomes less and less green and more and more cool gray. It's logical, systematic, and obvious.

I want to note another difference between this and the delta painting. They're both narrow-slice-of-pie tonalist paintings, but for different reasons. You see, this painting is green because the subject – grass– is green. The delta painting is blue-violet because the color theme is blue-violet. That's a subjective decision, a conscious choice on my part. The landmass, nor the trees, nor the sky was actually blue-violet. The grass in the cow painting is actually green. I didn't force a color theme onto it.

So why is that important? Technically speaking, (and this is just my observation and I might be wrong so take it with a grain of salt) When you're making a gray painting because the scene actually looks gray, you still need to pay a lot of attention to warm-cool relationships. A clear example is Sargent's Venice Par Temps Gris (yesterday's post) . Look at the soft cast shadows of the people in the foreground – see how warm they are compared to the surrounding lit surface?

In contrast, when you're working in a subjective single-color theme situation, forcing color temperatures can really screw up the painting because in this color system, temperature shifts are often irrelevant. You might sneak some of it in if you do it extremely subtly, but you can't do it like the impressionists. It's just a different system of organizing visual reality, and the two don't mix.

There are other reasons for using a narrow-piece-of-pie, like when the light has a lot of color; late afternoon sun, or nocturnal situations under mercury street lights. The orange light of the afternoon sun might bathe everything in orange, but the shadow side might look really blue because of the sky's blue ambient light. On the other hand, if everything looks orange in the afternoon because the atmosphere is lit orange, and this orange atmosphere veils the shadows as well as the lit areas, you aren't going to get much temperature shifts at all. Forcing cool shadows in this case might ruin the desired atmospheric mood. Painting L.A. smog falls under this category. In each case, you have to determine BEFORE you start, whether temperature shifts are relevant or not. Knowing why it might or might not be relevant will allow you to make that distinction with confidence, and that confidence will most definitely show in your work.

So go ahead. take a small piece of the pie. Or take the whole pie. But if you take a small piece, don't pretend you have the whole pie, and vice versa. Bon appétit!

Painting Tonally; Blue Violet

Delta Par Temps Gris, 8.5 x 16 inches, oil on linen

Here is another tonalist landscape, this time in blue-violet. It's more or less a monochromatic picture, which suits me just fine when trying to convey the damp moodiness of the Sacramento delta in the colder seasons.

The basic structure of this painting is that the dark landmass, as it recedes into the distance, becomes systematically lighter and closer in color to the sky. That's it. That's all it is.

John Singer Sargent, Venice Par Temps Gris 1882 (?)

The title of my painting is a reference to one of my favorite Sargent sketches, Venice Par Temps Gris. It is a beautifully executed sketch of Venice, seen from somewhere near the Naval History Museum, I'd guess. You can see the Bell Tower (in San Marco Square) to the right, and Santa Maria della Salute in the distance. As the title suggests, it's a very gray painting, but it's far from monochromatic. (Click on the image to see a bigger jpeg with more accurate colors.)Unlike my "narrow slice of pie" painting, Mr. Sargent is working in the center of the color wheel, where everything is muted down but touches every hue. Look at the cool blues in the Santa Maria della Salute, the yellows in the sky, and the warm red violets in the foreground. Very subtle but distinct from one another, right? Simply gorgeous.

Notice, too, how much value range he has in the foreground, but the range diminishes systematically as we recede into the distance (compare the darks of the boats in the foreground, the bell tower in the middle distance and finally the dome of the Salute.

The biggest value contrast can be found in the foreground dark boats against the very light water, so that's where we expect to find the focal point (value contrast attracts a lot of attention) but he uses soft edges there so we don't linger there. The few saturated notes at the extreme foreground (together with sharp edges there) makes us go there instead.

If you isolated these saturated notes in the vendor cart (?) in the foreground, though, you'd see that it's not very saturated at all. It's just that everything else is even grayer. See, it's all relative.

I can stare at this painting all day, man. It's actually in a private collection so I doubt you can just go in and see the original, but it's sometimes included in big museum shows. I saw it at LACMA several years back when they did the Sargent and Italy exhibition. They published a beautiful catalogue which I highly recommend. It's one of my treasured books.

We'll talk more about working in the center of the pie soon~

Painting Tonally

After the Harvest, 11 x 14 inches, oil on linen

The painting above is a tonalist landscape; most of my paintings are. In contrast to high key, colorful works with lots of complementary action and chroma-rich shadows, this landscape uses very few colors. In fact, It's pretty much all oranges and reds, and muted ones at that. On the color wheel, orange and red are analogous. That is to say, next to each other. If you imagine the color wheel as a pie, what I used in my painting is a very small slice of pie. And that's one way to look at tonalism; a narrow piece of pie. I have a little bit of pale yellow on the ground plane, but that too is analogous to orange, right? A slightly larger piece of pie, but still a far cry from getting the whole pie like the high-key colorists do.

It seems like I'm getting a raw deal when I use the pie analogy. But there is a lot to be gained by using a small piece of pie. Simplicity. Harmony. Mood. These are all important to me, and with the narrow piece of the pie I'm able to tap into these ideas without confusing the issues (that is, if I'm successful).

But how do you make a convincing landscape with such few colors? First and foremost, you have to rely on value shifts. There is a very simple value structure to the design, of basically three values; Dark trees, medium land mass, and light sky. By keeping these big elements sufficiently separated by big value jumps, We can keep the design simple. There are smaller value shifts within the big elements, you'll notice. These internal value shifts must be subtle so that the big shapes don't get fragmented. When you squint at the tree, for example, we should just see the silhouette, despite the value shifts within the tree shape.

Wait, wasn't this post supposed to be about atmosphere? Well, it turns out, painting with a very narrow piece of the pie is a very good way to achieve atmospheric perspective because by its very nature, you're forced to paint the distant trees and hills (or whatever) the same hue as the foreground. The logic being applied here, is that you're not painting trees or hills (or whatever) but you're painting the atmosphere in front of it. The atmosphere has color which affects everything you see (much like wearing colored sunglasses) , and this color just happens to be – surprise – that narrow piece of the pie. You still have to control values and chroma to get convincing depth, but there's your atmosphere.

For focal areas, you may want a little more oompf. An obvious way to do that would be through value contrast and sharp edges. (See the roof on the other side of the field) Introducing other hues for the focal area sometimes works, but you have to be careful or it just looks like a mistake. What I did here is keep everything more or less muted down, and used a more saturated note of orange right where the focal point is. This way, you can reliably maintain harmony and unity in your painting.

But what if you're painting an red-orange-yellow painting but the sky is blue? Then what? The blue is, like, nowhere near my narrow piece of the pie!

This is where the "color is relative" rule must be applied with a little more care. In essence, the blue sky is not necessarily blue. It's blue relative to the orange context. When I isolate the bluest part of my sky and take it out of context, you can see that it's still within the orange piece of the pie. It's sort of a mauvy gray.

But this same color thrown in a sea of more saturated oranges become perceptively bluer.

Another way of thinking about this might be that it's a slightly bluer version of the orange. If you take a mix of orange puddle and start to add some blue into it, the color becomes more and more gray because the two hues are complementary. If you continue to mix blue into the mix, at some point it'll go past the neutral gray and become bluer and bluer. But you don't really have to go all the way to the blue side of the pie (nor do you want to) if you have established an orange context. (that is to say, you've committed yourself to taking only the orange piece of the pie) As you can see from this example, you don't even have to go all the way to neutral gray.

You do have to keep in mind at all times, what your color context is, and think about color relationships rather than individual colors. I think I've mentioned it before, but practicing painting tonally is a great way to sharpen your sensitivity to color relationships. Simplicity is the key. Oh, and use saturated notes sparingly.

Next, I'll post another tonalist landscape that's in the blue-violet piece of the pie. Stay tuned.

Grove Path

Grove Path, oil on linen

First of all, a big Thank You! to everyone who made the trip to SF for my opening last Saturday!! It was great seeing you there and I really appreciate your support. Your presence made my opening very special for me. Thank you very much!!

The opening went very well - the paintings looked great all hung nicely and properly lit. Some of my darker paintings really need to be lit thoughtfully in order to have the intended impact, so I was very happy to see Thomas had done just that. My own camera failed me but some friends took photos so I will post them later on when I get my hands on them.

It's a big relief to have the show behind me, and with several red dots to boot. And not surprisingly, I've been feeling a little anti-climactic and burnt out. But I can't slow down just yet! I have several group shows ahead of me with some tight deadlines, so I am still going full speed.

I'm painting both tonalist landscapes and cityscapes at the same time. It's interesting how they influence one another and have become more cohesive. That's a very very good thing. But I know that this kind of consistency is rather fleeting for me, so I am making a conscious effort to pay attention to the common elements within the divergent subject matter.

The painting above is one of the four landscape paintings that I've been working on after the city series. It's kind of nice to step away from the rigid perspectives of architecture for a while and just focus on shaping organic elements. The familiar atmosphere is comforting too.

Speaking of atmosphere, I have three more landscapes to show with lots of atmospheric perspective. And I'll get into the logistics of it in some depth. Stay tuned.


Oh, if you missed the opening night of Back to the City, the show will be up for the month of October at Thomas Reynolds Gallery in SF. Stop by and check 'em out if you find yourself in the city! Let me know what you think :-)

One Down, One To Go

Waiting at the Corner, 12 x 16 inches, oil on linen

Well! The opening reception of Waterways at Knowlton Gallery was great fun. It was very well attended, and I got to catch up with some old friends as well as make new ones. Thank you very much, to all of you who made the trip! If you missed the opening, you must catch the show before it closes. You can view the paintings online here.

Robin did an awesome job putting together the show! There were a bunch of paintings that I wish I could have taken home with me. Despite the economy, there were several red dots, including one on mine; Quiet Waters. It's always nice to start an exhibition with dots; it allows you to relax a bit and enjoy the party more. The wine tastes better too.

Afterwards, a handful of us ended up at a restaurant across the street and had a nice time winding down in a more intimate setting. Jean Stern shared with us his forthcoming book on California Impressionists - it is an absolutely gorgeous book of select works at the Irvine Museum – fresh off the press, not yet available. If you're interested in California landscape art, this is a must have for your library.

So today is a painting day for yet another group show coming up later in the year, and tomorrow we go to San Francisco for the opening of Back to the City. But like I said, the hard part's done and I just have to show up. A few of the paintings are already claimed, so this one too, will open with some dots. I'm happy and relieved about that.

The painting at the top is a 12 x 16 with a little bit of a narrative angle to it. It's interesting how, if you stick a figure in an environment, make her the focal point, but you don't make it a portrait, the narrative aspect becomes really strong. It actually takes quite an effort and considerable ingenuity to make it a subtle narrative. I don't want to illustrate and describe a storyline. I just want to offer a glimpse, and let the viewer complete the story in his or her own context.

Most of the time, when I paint figures into an environment like this, I don't use a model nor reference photos. I don't actually know what the figure is going to look like. I don't even know if it's going to be male or female. They just sort of... emerge out of the shadows and take shape. So I didn't mean to make her look like anyone in particular, but now that I look at the figure, she kinda looks like you, Randy.