Portraits 47 & 48/100

 

I worked on these two portraits at the same time, alternating focus between the two so that they would develop at the same rate. They were side by side on the same easel. This kind of exercise in the past has forced me to be a little less precious about each, and it worked a tiny bit this time, too. Process shots compiled below.

Thank you to Karen R and Varvara Klimova on the Museum app for the inspiring reference photos. 

Oil paint on 6x8” mdf panels.

Portrait 46/100

I found the lovely reference for this painting a while ago on the Museum by Sktchy app (thank you to Mickie Paige for the photo) and realized that I could count it in my portrait project. It's such a sweet moment as the baby looks into her mother's eyes.

This panel began as a landscape piece (unloved), which accounts for the green undertone. I love how paint overs bring surprising elements to a new painting. The subject matter made this painting a real challenge: so much skin, so little color! I worked hard to make the baby pudge feel soft and believable—what do you think? The lost edge near the baby's elbow was an accident, but I should remind myself to make more of these, because it makes the painting more interesting.

Portrait 45/100

 

I thought I'd shake up my process a bit, doing a wipe-out method to start. In this method, you put a thin wash of oil paint on the surface and then wipe out the areas of lightness in the image. Because I want to minimize my use of gamsol, I thought I'd try this method with lavender spike oil, which is sometimes used as a "natural" solvent to replace terps or gamsol. So I thinned my paint with the spike oil, put a thin layer all over, and then tried to wipe out the central face area using a paper towel with some extra spike oil on it. It was so gummy! Perhaps I was doing something wrong? And I did have all my windows open, but was still overwhelmed by the intense lavender smell. I did get a central light area, but I wanted to finesse it more than that so that you can already see her face structure, but that was not possible with the gummy state of affairs. I'm currently at the very bottom of this spike oil learning curve. I may figure it out in the future, but am a little afraid to try again.

 

Next, I sketched in the outline (first image below). Then I made a random-ish purply dark tone, midtone, and light to get the general form of her face. In the next step, perhaps you can see the grid lines I etched into the gummy paint? I wanted to experiment with adding unusual colors in a kind of mosaic pattern to her face. I tried to keep the value more or less correct while changing the hue. I didn't have a grand plan here, I was just experimenting!

 

I then etched in some squigglies for her hair, wondering if these marks would work in some places (no they would not). Last, I replaced some of the weird colors with more natural colors, but left some of the weirdness showing. Good times!

 

Thank you to Victoria B on the Museum by Sktchy app for the great reference photo. 

8x8" oil paint on mdf panel.

Portrait 44/100

 

Here is the next installment in my 100 portrait project. Thank you to Yulia Dereshko on the Museum by Sktchy app for the great reference photo. I loved including the abstract yellow shape in the background (also in the reference). It's 8x8" oil paint on mdf panel. 

I usually sketch before I paint, but for most of this piece I started out without a sketch and instead patched in some color areas. I wanted to see the result of this approach, which I'm frankly not as comfortable with. It started off almost right, though. As I went, I fixed the proportions, etc, and continued adding detail.

I used a limited palette of pyrrole red, magenta, hansa yellow medium, ultramarine blue, and white. I tried to get a more atmospheric painting in which the figure is more a part of the background and not so starkly separate. More learnings needed!

Portrait 43/100

 

I painted this as a commission portrait, with the instructions to place the Mayan calendar behind him. To make this amount of detail more achievable for me, I simplified the hieroglyphs into more general light-dark shapes, but I still had to get them in the right positions. Tracing to the rescue!

I painted the underpainting in acrylic (magenta and white), and then made the rest in oil paint. My iPhone camera messed up the magenta color, making it more red, in the first process shot below. The last one came from my scanner and is the most correct color.

Portraits 41 & 42/100

 

I've been playing around with expressionist paint color, inspired by a still life assignment for a color class I'm taking with Zoey Frank. I have this ongoing project of making 100 portraits, so I thought I'd use this assignment on portraits rather than a still life in order to pick up my portrait pace.

I used photo references—many thanks to Ashley Urunkar and Milla Weideman on the Museum by Sktchy app (and apologies for the distortions in your beautiful faces!). I began each piece with semi-blind contour drawings using a black Micron pen. Unlike fully blind contour drawings, where you never look at the page, I allowed myself to glance at the paper when placing the pen, so the results are still quirky but a bit more controlled.

These drawings were done on Kraft paper, then sealed with a thin layer of GAC100 (an acrylic medium) to prevent the oil paint from soaking too much into the fibers.

Then came the color—sometimes realistic, sometimes expressive. To help break away from the literal colors in the reference, I converted the images to grayscale and started from there. I’ve found that getting the values roughly right makes a big difference in how the portraits read, even when the colors are far from being skin-toned. Much more experimentation needed!

Here are some process images: