Portrait 85/100

 

This is the second painting I've made from a batch of reference photos I purchased from Stephen Bauman. I worked on developing the face here, but wanted to keep her hair mostly graphic, as one big shape with slight color changes. 

I have become a much faster painter from when I first started 5 years ago, but I need breaks after painting for just a few hours. In the progress shots below, the top three (drawing and color block in) happen on the first day and the rest on day two. 

The last image was taken with my scanner and is truer to the colors than the others are.

Today I will start another painting of this lovely model.

Portrait 84/100

 

I recently purchased a model pack from Stephen Bauman. This is the first painting of Ingvild that I've painted from the reference photos, and I'm planning to do a lot more, with the idea of working on the last 17 portraits of my series of 100. This way, I can keep the oil paint on my palette as useful as possible from one portrait to the next. 

Here are some progress shots. The last image was taken with my scanner, which explains the color shift (which is truer to the painting than the iPhone shots).

Portraits 82 & 83/100

 

I told my nephew and niece-to-be that I'd love to paint a portrait of them in honor of their upcoming wedding, and here it is. Thank you to Alison for the lovely reference photo. The reference photo was in a dark venue--perhaps a concert or something like that? Everything was gray or black or brown except their faces, so I decided to lean into that for the portrait. 

His black t-shirt had a reddish undertone on the right and got a darker, cooler black toward the left, where it was more in shadow. The lettering on his shirt was white, but I made it gray so that it didn't stand out as much and compete with their faces. I also made the gray lettering slightly greenish to complement the reddish aspect of his shirt. I took a workshop from the wonderful painter Erin Raedeke on color and light, and she often pushed adjacent shapes into more of a complementary color relationship, which I thought was really interesting. So here I did that as a choice with the red-green relationship. Yay to me for making artistic choices!

You can see some in-between process photos below. The last photo was taken with my scanner, which shows a truer color than the others, which I took with my iPhone. This is 9x12" oil paint on mdf panel.

Portrait 81/100

 

I went to a live model portrait session a few days ago and came away with this portrait. Oil paint on 8x10 panel. I will eventually finish this painting, but for now it will sit in spot #81.

Here are some process shots. The last image is captured with my scanner, which explains the lighting difference.

Portraits 79 & 80/100

Many thanks to Karen for asking me to paint her family. I almost feel that I know them! These are the parents in oil paint on 8x10 panel. We settled on this background color so that the portrait would fit with the 3 others, all of which have colorful backgrounds.

And here are some process shots:

And here are more process shots. I attempted to varnish this one before it was dry enough. With Gamvar, the painting can be touch dry in order to varnish, but I misjudged this one. Lesson learned! So I removed the varnish, which had picked up paint and ruined the portraits, and I also removed any other paint that would come up with mineral spirits. I used this same board as a starting place for repainting the portraits, this time with a different background color:

Portrait 78/100

 

I have been asked to paint all three of a client's children, and am really happy with how the portraits are coming out. All of the reference photos have toothy smiles, so I'm getting more and more practice doing teeth and can declare that I no longer have a "no teeth" policy. :)

I gessoed the panel with an unbleached titanium color gesso. I liked the brown/taupe overall look of it and was even thinking that the dark underpainting on the hat and shirt should be left alone to provide a contrast in texture with the rest of the painting. In the end I decided against it, because the other two portraits have colorful backgrounds, so I needed to keep them more visually consistent.

This is oil paint on an mdf panel.

Portraits 71–77/100

I found the reference image for this series of portraits on Pinterest. My apologies to the photographer—I don’t know their name—but the subject is the actor Alba Rohrwacher. I’m using the reference photo for practice rather than for profit, so I hope that this falls within acceptable copyright use. I painted these on ungessoed, unprepared Kraft paper, so I expect the paintings to disintegrate eventually anyway!

In the main image, I did my usual thing, trying to pin down specific color patches for different areas of the face. In the panel of smaller, quicker paintings, I used a monochromatic modeling system that I recently learned about from an excellent video by Kerry Dunn. His demos were far more impressive than you might guess from my attempts here.

I’d like to keep practicing this method, as I think it will be especially helpful when painting from live models. In the videos, Kerry uses thick and thin passages of burnt umber for the shadows, and then another color (usually orangey, mixed with various amounts of white) for modeling the light side of the face. In its simplest form, this is the only color added, but he also demonstrated how and where he begins to introduce other colors into the face. I may not have interpreted his method correctly, so if you’re interested, I recommend following him to see his videos. He has offered videos periodically on instagram, and you sign up in the comment section when he makes these offerings. @paintkerrypaint on Instagram.