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:
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