more finished

I wasn't happy with the likeness I had when the modeling session ended, so I took a photo and worked on it a while longer. Going into skin shadows, I used viridian to drop saturation of the orange skin tone, and darkened with manganese violet. I cut back on my use of medium because too much condemns my indecisive color corrections into murky soup. 16" x 14" - 5 hours.

new colors

Second try using the brighter skin palette that I've switched to. Figure is a little stiff and the painting needs to be cropped. It's going to take some time to learn how to handle greens and violets in the shadows. 16" x 14" - 3 hours.

goodbye ochre,

burnt sienna too. I didn't use any earth colors in the skin tone for this painting. Hardly any red or blue either. Instead, I shifted to prismatic, more secondary colors. Light side flesh was mixed from yellow and magenta. Shadow flesh was cooled and shaded with viridian and cerulean blue. Sienna and umber browns were replaced with mixtures of perinone orange, viridian, and alizarin crimson. Getting away from earth colors and instead using high chroma dye-based pigments gives more color space for scarlets, mauves, violets and greens to model volumes. I didn't pull it off so well in this painting, but I think this is the way to go.

I started with a high contrast two value block-in and any features in partial shade, like the eyes, were painted as a simple dark mass. I did this more for positioning than to depict appearance. I need to remember to add some construction lines and double-check proportions at this point, then lift out detailing.

Also, I thinned the Galkyd underpainting with Turpentoid so it went on thinner and looser. As it set, I found I could brush on skin modeling with hog-bristle brights and paint straight from the tube, just like canvas. Top coats, I used a linseed/stand oil/Gamsol mixture. I took a photo of the model, so I'll see if I can clean this up a bit and re-post. 16" x 14" - 3 hours.

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.