Final week this Session, Putting it all together!

This wraps up 12 great weeks of portrait drawing and painting. Everyone has made great steps forward, by building each week on their knowledge and skills.Scroll back to older posts to see our progress. This week was a long hour and a half pose, giving everyone a longer time to look, make corrections, and develop their portraits. Congratulations to our online students and islanders, working live from the model. Look for our class to begin next fall (November?) with long poses and a full color palette.

Final week of this Session, Putting it all together!

We had a nice hour and 1/2 session with our model. Everyone is making good observations, and getting it down with paint on canvas!

Portrait Paintings from Week Five

This week, everyone was putting together a lot of skills: observation, value and edge observations, mapping out and measuring, seeing where the light falls, using the negative shapes to carve out shapes, cutting back, and last but not least, adding more paint. Thanks to our wonderful model Laura for a great session!

Portait Painting Week Five

What a great session, everyone was enjoying our long pose and making good observations, translating into paint. The more everyone looked, the more they saw.

Week Four, Two Tones

Today was exciting as we started to make the move from underdrawing to painting. We applied more paint to the light areas, and exciting things started to happen. We were working with 2 tones, laying in the dark shadows first, and then coming in with a light tone for the lighter areas.Some intersection of paint had hard edges, others had soft edges, we were starting to really be able to see those kinds of edges, hard and soft edges that define the portrait.

Week Four..... A second color, Finally!

Today we finally brought out a second color onto our palettes. We used burnt umber for a dark tone and a light, naples yellow or yellow ochre mixed with titanium white, a warm light tone. Today's idea was to lay in the dark shadow shapes, and then with a different clean brush, go in and define the light areas. The results were somewhat graphic. Since we were only using 2 tones it forced us to really concentrate on edges. We also enjoyed an ease to make corrections by pushing paint, or cutting an area back. This happened especially in the negative space around the portrait. Exciting things were happening as artist were applying more paint. Our poses today were each 20 minutes. Many thanks to our wonderful model, Noreen Ignelzi!

Week 3 The Head as a Cube, 3/4 View

We were thinking about the head as a cube today and how that effects the eye line and the mouth line. Drawing out a box from the 3/4 view, there are 2 vanishing points on either side. Often the vanishing points are well off the canvas, several feet to one side. What this means for the mouth is that it is at an angle very slightly different from the eyeline. Establish the tilt of the eyes, and then see how the mouth is a few degrees different. I just photoshopped several red lines onto a drawing which illustrate the most forward part of the 3/4 view:the cheek and how the eye and mouth run off at slightly different angles using their vanishing point to the right of the canvas.
The other thing about 3/4 view is that we don't see all of the mouth, the far corner is often obscured by the lobes of the lips. And we don't see the far inside corner of the eye, it is obscured by the bridge of the nose. We do see a great profile of the cheek bone. Not everyone had a 3/4 view, but when you get one, it's nice to know how to handle it, turning the features.
It's great to find an opportunity to tie together several pieces of shadow into one shape, and even loose some edges.

Week Three, The head as a Cube, 3/4 View part 2

Of all the things you can do to create space, using a vanishing point, is one of the most powerful tools.