Aimee Final

Here is the final version of the Aimee portrait that I've been working on. It was done almost entirely with Raw Umber, Venetian Red, and White. There is also a little ivory black to darken parts and to get the greys of the eyes.

Aimee WIP1

I've worked about three days on this since my last post, so it appears to be a much bigger jump between this and the dead color stage.

I avoided posting because I thought it looked horribly un-viewable up until now. I almost stopped working on it because I didn't like where it was going, but I gave it one more day and now I can finally see how the painting will turn out in the end and be happy with it when it's completed.

For the skin tones I am only using White, Raw Umber, and Venetian Red. I used some Cad. Red in the lips and some Ivory black in the whites of the eyes and shadows.

Aimee Dead Color

I decided to start the next painting with a monochromatic underpainting. This will also only be painting in three colors (four if you count white).

Stan Final-ish

I still need to adjust a few more things to this portrait. I'll have to wait at least a week for the paint to dry before finalizing it. It is pretty much finished though, I doubt I'll have much more to do.

Let me know what you think I always enjoy getting comments and e-mails.

Stan WIP2

I haven't been posting in the last couple of days so this is about three days worth of work to the portrait. I am almost finished today I'll work on the hair and hopefully the shirt as well. Then I will only need to let the paint dry and add a few more alterations and it will be finished.

Stan WIP1

I have spent some time working on the shadows, dark-half tones, and the cheeks. I'll start on the features today.

Stan Dead Color

Dead color is when you only lay in the basic flat (or dead) color and value of an area. I could simplify the dead coloring by making just one color for the shadow and one for the face. I could also dead color in a more detailed way rounding every little form. There is a great deal of choice for this stage of the painting. Some people skip it altogether and just move onto the direct painting stage after the dry-brush stage.

I find that skipping this layer makes it much harder for me to accurately find the right color scheme and value structure in my paintings. Dead coloring lets me apply very light layers of paint until I get the right color and values for each area before I apply thick layers of paint all over the canvas.

Stan Dry-Brush

Dry-brush painting is where one uses only a very small amount of pigment on one's brush, wipes off the excess paint, and uses the minute number of particles remaining to scrub pigment into the canvas. Generally it is done with Burnt or Raw Umbers because of the dark value and quick drying time.

This is my dry-brush painting of my new painting Stan. I used Burnt umber to block in all of the shadows and the background. The one problem with my dry-brush in this situation is that I did not block in the entire mustache as one value, (I could have done it in two as well with one being the light and one being the shadow of the mustache). By not darkening the light of the mustache I am saying that the light part of it is the same value as the face. I should have made it a value darker than white to give it a darker distinction like I did for the stripes on the tie. In this way it would have described his light mustache as a darker value, but still not as dark as the shadow of the mustache.

Stan Cartoon

Here is the Stan transfer from my drawing. I am very excited to start working on this today. I did my usual rub on the back of the paper transfer, but didn't use charcoal this time. I instead, tried using a dark brown conte crayon. I've been told that it should help by not smearing or mixing with the paint, which is what charcoal wants to do to ruin your day.

I'll let everyone know how it turns out in my next post, and if I forget to mention it remind me. I'm thinking of you Rob.

Stan Thumbnail Painting

I'm starting a new painting. This is it's little thumbnail painting that I did today so that I know the color scheme for the entire piece. I do think I'll darken the chin quite a bit though to give a greater sense of form to the entire face. Otherwise, this is what it will look like.

It is a tiny little painting that is 6in x 4.5in in size. The final piece will be 16in x 12in. I like to make my little painting the exact same scale as my big painting so that I can see what the tiny composition will look like.

Allison Final

Here is the final version of my Allison painting. I glazed some darker parts of the hair. Re-worked the sky and fixed some rounding issues with the arm. I got a number or framing samples to test different types of gold and silver frames for this piece. I might post some photoshoped versions of the samples to let people vote on which one's they like.

Allison WIP6

I worked on the hair. I've also been out of town so I wasn't able to work on or post anything about this painting. I have finished though, I'll post the final version next.