My friend Carlos, who wants to experiment with natural-light photographic portraits, joined me for the first session with my neighbor Rita. He made a number of beautiful pictures, while I snapped photos of Rita from my on-looker’s vantage.
Rita at ease
After he left, I did a quick charcoal sketch of Rita, in a three-quarter pose. It was ok for the first session, but I didn’t like the pose and definitely wanted to capture a grin, if not a smile, in the final product.
I am working on a portrait series of several neighbors, hoping to improve my portraiture skills. My across-the-street neighbor, Rita, has been my first subject. And what a subject she’s been. I’m very happy with the outcome and am happy that she likes it too. Thanks, Rita!
The wonderful DC-area Writers Center regularly hosts art exhibits in its large space, featuring the works of local artists. Ten of my paintings will be included in the next show, scheduled to open in late June. This exhibit is organized around the works of those who have painted with Gonzalo Navarro, a fellow teacher at the Yellow Barn Studio in Glen Echo, MD. I have enjoyed Gonzalo’s teaching expertise — it’s always good to practice skills under the tutelage of an expert in portraiture and figurative painting. It’s great to have Gonzalo at the Yellow Barn, as well as Maud Taber-Thomas, supplementing the excellent portraiture teaching of Gavin Glakas.
Here is one of the paintings I’ll show in the upcoming exhibit. More to follow.
I recently studied portrait painting with Bill Schneider. After he did a wonderful demo, Bill had us emulate Nicholai Fechin’s gorgeous ‘broken color’ style, by copying (on a larger scale, so we could practice our facial measuring skills) some Fechin portraits.
Fechin’s portrait (L) and my copy. oil on canvas.
First I copied one of Fechin’s beautiful women. And then this precious child.
Fechin’s portrait (L) & my copy. oil on canvas.
The next day we painted from a live model, attempting to apply the broken color method on our own. Quite a difference in beauty, eh? (Just keeping it real!)
Working toward Fechin’s ‘broken color’ in painting from life. oil on Arches oil paper.
I ended the weekend workshop with lots to practice and mull. Thanks, Bill!
I made a quick portrait study yesterday during a class I’m taking with Maud Taber-Thomas. I hadn’t been able to attend for several weeks and was happy to be back.
Dozing Damsel. Oil on Arches Oil Paper.
During the first class, Maud had recommended as homework that we draw a series of skulls, each in a different position. I was tickled to have found online an inexpensive, life-size plastic model. I brought it in yesterday to show, along with the drawings I’d done. You can catch a glimpse of the skull herself in the last post, where she’s shown modeling for the painting.
Skull drawings. Charcoal. (Doesn’t that one at middle left look like Donald Duck?)
Two weeks ago my sister Ceci traveled up from Louisiana to take a couple of art workshops with me. The first was a three morning (!) portrait painting workshop with Maud Taber-Thomas of the Yellow Barn. Ahead of time I was very skeptical that we’d be able to learn much about portrait painting in three half-days — especially in view of the four months it had taken me to do the one of Dad.
Maud used a very clever curriculum to crack that nut. Morning One: Draw a charcoal or pencil sketch of the model. Here’s our excellent model.
And my initial sketch.
Morning Two: Apply that sketch to our canvas and paint a monochromatic value study (in burnt sienna oil paint, in our case) over the sketch, making any drawing adjustments we thought necessary.
Morning Three: Apply more colors over the value study, using an extremely limited palette of white, yellow ochre, venetian red, and ultramarine blue. That gave us three primary colors (of sorts), and the possibility of mixing the secondaries, green, orange & purple (of sorts). Here’s how mine stood at the end of the third morning.
And here’s how it looked after a bit of tinkering back at home. I tried to soften the jaw line; make her eyes and mouth more pleasant, as our lovely model’s had been; and re-contour the edge of her face on the left side. I’m encouraging sister Ceci to post hers too! Hers were lovely – much more painterly than mine.
The next (huge) task in painting my Dad’s portrait was to meld the many photographic references into a single coherent whole. I needed to get the head, arms, torso orientation all into similar sizes and then try to get them to connect to each other in a reasonable way. If I were a better Photoshop practitioner, this might have been a snap. But my attempts were so lame that I seriously considered resorting to cut and paste.
Here are a few of my horrible Photoshop mashups, along with my much more useful iPad sketches.
stacking the pieces into a rough order
stripping out the extraneous stuff
stacking the consolidated torso over the table pose
first try at iPad version
the final one of several efforts to unify the elements into a composition
I’m still a long way from putting brush to canvas. In fact, the canvas may not even be up on the easel yet. I’m finding it useful to ‘spend’ more time working up an iPad sketch of the overall pose. Here are a few glimpses of that sequence.
Living too far from Biloxi for regular painting from life and lacking a good photo for a portrait, I had to develop a suitable composition from bits and pieces.
As a starting point, I selected this photo of Dad in a characteristic setting — at the kitchen table, managing his projects via telephone. He’s a master at persuasive phone calls – and is even better at advocating in person.
A Favorite Photo of Dad. Basis of Portrait Composition. 2011.
Problem: while this made for a strong, natural-looking composition, we needed to nix the green shirt & broad smile for a bit more formality — and adjust the foreshortened hand and table, caused by being too close when taking the photo. After sifting through piles of images, I selected these as as further inspiration:
I liked the idea of a navy or black suit, combined with the classy informality of an open collared white shirt. (One of Dad’s favorite looks.) These photos also include serious, yet pleasant, facial expressions, as well as body positions similar to the St. Patrick’s Day image.
