the distance law of portraiture

I've come to realize it's no use trying to paint big, detailed faces from 20 feet away. Maybe my vision is weak,  but I can't see eyes well enough to paint them from more than about 10 feet. In fact, I think frustration increases with the square of the distance to the sitter. Since I was in a big, full studio situation for this effort, I tried for a whole figure which is always a race to finish in a session. I can't remember painting this loosely in a long time. I switched to hog bristle brights for the block-in so I could quickly scrub in a thin layer of paint and Galkyd. Then I switched to softer Bristlon synthetics for an oil layer. 16" x 14" - 3 hours

not as bad as I thought

I almost left early because I thought this was a lost cause. I scraped off one eye and moved it 1/2 inch with a half-hour to go and thought I was flailing around matching colors for the repaint. One thing that helped though, was that the first color I painted was the local color at the border of light and shade. Thinking about it, it makes sense to start with this "true" color and then make lights and shades relative to it. I don't know why I hadn't thought of that before, but I'm going to try to stick with this rule for a while.

Next morning I thought better of my efforts. My camera is adding saturation, but I like the effect. 16" x 14" - 3 hours.

2nd try

I sketched for 25 minutes, then scrubbed out my first block-in, so I had to hurry this one up. As usual, time pressure seems to help. 16" x 14" - 2.5 hours.

glazing tints

Since this painting went pretty well, I'm journaling my process here. This time I broke the preliminary painting into two steps. First I used a big egbert brush and mopped in the layout in a thin orange mix of burnt sienna and yellow ochre. Then I spent about 20 minutes completing a darker brown line drawing and scumbling in shadows with a #2 round.  Next I took a stab at a first layer for the entire surface using thin painting mixtures of Galkyd and Turpentoid. I'm not sure whether this is a good idea or not, but I didn't use any white paint at this stage. Instead I just wiped the paint layer thin to get light from the gesso, like painting in watercolor. My rule of thumb is to paint with Galkyd until it gets sticky and annoying. Then I switched to a linseed, stand oil, Gamsol mixture and floated glazes over the gunk. I mixed in white sparingly in the glaze and the skin seemed to stay luminous. I think this is probably a backwards approach to tinting, but it seemed to work. 16" x 14" - 3 hours.

Venetian red

About halfway through, I picked up a tube of Venetian red instead of burnt sienna. A few months ago I discovered what a great color it is, but I was having some success with burnt sienna so I dropped it for simplicity. Burnt sienna is ok for tints, but makes murky brown tones and shades. Venetian red, however, tones with blue to make really nice violet skin shadows. 17.5" x 15" - 3 hours

inevitable

I unpacked at the modeling session and found I had forgotten my brushes - it had to happen eventually. So I borrowed a couple of pencils and drew on gessoed board. 12" x 9" - 3 hours.

farmers market

Painted on location at a downtown farmers market. Very complicated scene, so I just painted a few impressions of activity under the awnings. 9" x 12" - 2.5 hours