Gavin McDermott

Rather than drawing the portrait first, today’s exercise was to start with a significant facial feature (an eye!) and work outwards from this.

The Zorn Palette was again used and worked just as well for negro skin tones as it had done for the caucasian subject in week three. I’m still wondering what the sap green will be for–one of the colours we were recommended to acquire before the course start.

Be kind to yourself!
Portrait painting is the hardest

En-passant the temperature of shadows was discussed, with warm highlights having cool shadows and vice versa.

We had a look at works by Lucian Freud, including some incomplete paintings showing where he’d started… in the middle of the canvas (Oh, and unravelled as he realised the canvas wasn’t big enough sometimes, and had to splice extra bits on to accommodate peripheral body parts.

We also discussed the work of Adebanji Alade , too.

The subject today had beautifully warm skin tones and the highlights were made cooler by adding blue.

In theory this inside-out approach works well for art in a hurry (eg with a real life model in a time-bound session) and also for artists with weaker drawing and compositional skills.

However…

Earlier on in the course we discussed a standard way to work with oils going from dark to light – so far, so okay. We’d also mentioned working from thin to fat, and I think this is where I came unravelled… Because the drawing was imperfect and needed correction and tweaks, and I had somehow got too much paint on the surface by the time I needed to make adjustments. My starting point of the eye had quite ‘fat’ paint applied by the time I’d got to the light tones, built up on the darker tones underneath.

Trying to work with light and dark skin tones simultaneously also caused me problems in managing both the number of brushes on the go (Four brushes and I was a bit like Edward Scissorhands), and also my palette quickly degenerated into a sort of sludge.

By the end my proportions were some way out, and I did feel a bit like I’d been grappling with a tar-baby, and had paint all over the place and quite thick (too thick!) to be easily adjusted.

However, in the spirit of win-or-learn I have several options to explore going forwards:

• Make sure my paint stays thin when I try this approach again
• Be meticulous about separating brushes into pairs of dark and light for each brush size
• Also, be a lot more precise with my drawing as I ‘develop’ my painting expanding from the central focus

More drastically, as I don’t much like getting messy hands, I could also investigate either

• Water mixable oils (Got some already, and can more thoroughly clean and dry things between colours)
• Switch back to acrylics but add a slow-drying medium where I want the blending capability of oils

Peter did also advocate a fusion to suit between these two approaches of inside-out and under-painting/drawing.

—

Before this session I added additional detail to the previous week’s painting, and attempted another

Don’t paint someone you know!