Big Eyes
- Keane waif
- big eye art
- 1960s waif
A large-eyed melancholy child, painted in murky colour against a bleak background.
Opens an image model with the prompt in it. The price is on the page before you sign in.
What it is for
Big eye art was the most reproduced painting style of the 1960s and it still triggers an immediate reaction, usually somewhere between pity and unease.
That makes it a strong, strange choice for anything charitable or anything knowingly kitsch, and a terrible choice for anything else.
How it works
Enlarge the eyes until they take up half the face, dark, wet and catching one highlight. Head oversized, body thin and elongated.
Paint softly in oil with blended edges and a faint glow around the figure, no hard graphic lines.
Palette is murky: umber, grey-green, dusty blue. Background is bleak and almost empty, an alley, a wall, a beach. Title in hand-painted script.
When to use it
Use it for an animal charity, a vintage fair, a kitsch night, a thrift shop, a 60s-themed event, a film season about the period.
Leave it alone for anything that needs to be taken seriously. The style has been a punchline since about 1970.
Told apart from its neighbours
Pre-Raphaelite work is equally melancholy but sharply rendered, jewel coloured and medieval.
Modern big-eye illustration, as in lowbrow or pop surrealism, is brighter and graphically cleaner.
Crayon folk work is genuinely naive rather than sentimental.
Where it was used
Margaret Keane painted them and her husband Walter claimed them until a 1986 court case settled the matter by having both paint in the courtroom. The prints sold in their millions through five-and-dime stores, and Gig produced the sad-eyed animal version.
- Margaret Keane
- Gig
- 1960s five-and-dime prints
The prompt
Replace the blanks with your own event, keep the rest. Then run it on an image model.
poster for <event>, 1960s big eye waif painting, one child with enormous dark shining eyes filling half the face, thin elongated body and oversized head, murky palette of umber grey-green and dusty blue with a bleak empty background, soft blended oil painting with a faint glow around the figure, sentimental melancholy expression, hand-painted script title, <date, time and place> in small serif at the base
What goes wrong
The model returns a cheerful modern cartoon child. Ask for a murky palette, a bleak empty background and a genuinely melancholy expression.
The second failure is sharp graphic edges. Say soft blended oil painting with a faint glow around the figure.
Leave out
bright cheerful colour, sharp graphic edges, busy background, modern type
Watch for
It only works if the mood is genuinely sad. A smiling big-eye figure reads as a modern cartoon.
Questions
Print it
Pay for the one run. No subscription, and the price is on the model page before you sign in.
Next to it in pop and the street
