first painting...second sitting
had my second portrait class with joe today. i have been waiting a whole week to continue with this model and learn more about the process that i am working with. because i am an idiot, i did not bother to clean my palette. i made this mistake for two reasons: 1- I thought that my paint would still be wet 2- I needed to remember what colors i had mixed the week before. joe made sure that i payed for my insolence and demanded that i clean my palette before i started to paint. sweet. well turns out that i did not have a razor blade for my scraper. sweet again. i did not expect to be having to spend 30 minutes cleaning my palette with a palette knife. this sucked. afterwards, i decided to rework some of the features, now with a fresh eye. coming at it with a new head on my shoulders allowed me to step back and discover the things that i missed last class.
so to discuss the pics below, again, bad pics. tonight i was learning how to build on the structure that i had previously established. this proved to be very hard but i learned a lot. i still have a long way to go, obviously. the smartest and best thing i did was establish my darkest darks. i did this by roughing the hair in. this allowed me to frame the shape of the head and as i mentioned, gave me a dark value to relate to. unfortunately, i did this just before cleaning up and i noticed that once i had a value i knew was correct, how washed out everything else it. ( see b and w below)
any hoo, im gonna cut the jibba jabba.
so to discuss the pics below, again, bad pics. tonight i was learning how to build on the structure that i had previously established. this proved to be very hard but i learned a lot. i still have a long way to go, obviously. the smartest and best thing i did was establish my darkest darks. i did this by roughing the hair in. this allowed me to frame the shape of the head and as i mentioned, gave me a dark value to relate to. unfortunately, i did this just before cleaning up and i noticed that once i had a value i knew was correct, how washed out everything else it. ( see b and w below)
any hoo, im gonna cut the jibba jabba.
posted by drawatron at 11:00 PM
2 Comments:
Hey Chris,
That sucks about the 30 min. palette cleaning! I never have understood why oil people alway insist on the hard palettes, that you spend as much time cleaning as painting. Since graduating school (and not having a teacher tell me it's sacrilege) I've started using disposable palettes. They don't waste that much..you can use them for quite a while, and when everything is dry and crumbly you tear off the top and a new sheet is ready to go. Saves a lot of time for painters who don't have a lot of it. :)
Okay I'll get off my soap box. I think your painting is looking great, and it's really interesting to see him take you through all these steps. Thanks for posting pics along the way. I really like the warm colors you've put on her nose cheeks and chin. Nice stuff!
I like getting these oil painting tips! It has been a whole summer and I still haven't really attempted doing an oil painting. Maybe that will be a project for this weekend.
Anyway Chris, this looks really great, and it's nice to see you taking these steps and analyzing what you are doing. Last summer, it seemed like you would try to do something amazing all in one sitting and you would get frustrated if it didn't work out. Baby step to the finished oil painting.... and keep posting progress, it's cool to see!
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