Saturday, July 3, 2010

Breakthrough

I've been working on this portrait of Eric for awhile.  I don't have a lot of time at one sitting but I have managed to put in about about 20 hours already.  The thing I loved about this sitting was the warm lighting on his face and the cool tones on his chest.... his skin looked almost translucent.  I wanted to find a way to replicate that.

The live sitting was a nice study (see earlier blog.) But the photo that I took of the session was beautiful and moody and dark and really inspired me to do another painting working from the photo.  I uploaded the images from my camera, tweaked them in PS, and then printed a couple out.  I'm ALWAYS disappointed in the results of the printer.  But I thought that with the original study and the images together I could get close to what I wanted. 

Then I got a brilliant idea.  I got my hands on our old PC and hooked it up on the table beside my easel with the monitor sitting on top of it and began paint off the monitor.  What a delight!  I opened a couple of photos from the session and now I can push and pull the values, zoom in and out as much as I want, and tweak the hue if needed.  Wish I had done this before.  It is fabulous.

Over the last year I have really gotten bold with mixing the skin tones.  Today I woke up from a nap with the idea of mixing raw ochre with dioxyzine purple for the skin tones.  That really started adding some life likeness to the build up. Also I have been using Liquin as a medium and absolutely learning to love it.  It makes the paints really move a lot but dries overnight so I build layers quickly. 

I'm also really happy to be learning how to paint at the drop of a hat.  I really don't have a lot of concentrated time to paint and the most time consuming part of oil painting is laying out the palette and cleaning it up.  And I don't care what system is advertised: they don't keep paints wet for long.  So I've got a nice little cigar box with a tight fit and a brass clasp that I fitted a pane of glass for.  I lay out my paints in there but mix them on a bigger pallette.  But when I'm ready to paint I pop open my homemade pochade and paint as little or as long as I like and then snap it shut when I'm done.  I still have to scrape down my bigger palette but that's not a problem.  Like a plein air painter, ready to go at the moment's notice.  Hope you like it.  More soon.

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