Matilda’s Portrait is Finished

Portrait Commission, 2016, oil on canvas, 12 x 18″

New Business Cards

Plants – ugh.

I’m doing the plants on this portrait now. I have to say, I don’t really like doing plants! It’s a beautiful green, but leaves are complicated, especially when they overlap like this. I really prefer to paint textiles and interior spaces. Hopefully I can just rock through it all today and get it over with. I’m starting with the darkest parts farthest back and moving forward.

Adjusting Grisaille

I’m working on this little portrait for a dear friend of mine. Today I did the grisaille on the skin and I am waiting for this to dry so that I may finish the skin tomorrow. When I had done the grisaille I stepped back and decided that it was too dark around the eyes and I started taking some off with mineral spirits on a brush. This is dangerous work though! The mineral spirits can be unpredictable and it is easy to take off too much. I got lucky today but it’s not recommended – better to put on too little and keep adding than to take off excess.

Self Portrait

I’m happy to have finished this little painting (20 x 25cm) that I plan to use for my business cards. I want to have simple white cards again, so I have painted the background white with a little skin colour thrown in for texture. I would like for this painting to blend into the white of the card. I’m not usually proud of myself, but I have to admit that I have done a good job on this one! I will try to take some better photos once this is dry later this week.

Finishing the Skin

Once my skin colour velatura is painted on the lighter areas, I start putting in red touches with vermillion red on the nose, cheeks, eyelids, lips, etc, and then I take pure white and paint it into the highlights, as seen in the first photo. Then I mix burnt umber and black and retouch the darkest lines in the mouth, eyelashes, nostrils, etc, with a very fine brush (you can see my hand slipped on the eyebrow in the second photo). I also drag white through the irises of the eyes for grey or blue eyes, and finally, big dabs of white for the reflections in the eyes.

Skin Velatura

The next layer on the skin in my self-portrait is what you might call ‘skin colour.’ I make a velatura and paint it onto the light and medium areas (seen in the second photo) and I leave underpainting in the shadows. A velatura is a very thin glaze, and here I have used my 60% linseed oil/40% mineral spirits mix along with my skin colour. Skin colour can easily be made from mixing roughly equal portions of yellow ochre, vermillion red, and white.

Grisaille

Grisaille is essentially a grey-scale glaze that goes on top of my burnt umber underpainting, and that is what I have just completed here on my self-portrait. There are still more layers to go on the skin, but it is amazing how the grisaille transforms a sketch into a painting. My grisaille tends to be more black than grey though, and that is because I want the shadows to be more dramatic. I thin my grisaille with a mix of 60% mineral spirits/40% linseed oil, so that I can lay it on as thin or thick as I need in each shadow.

What a deal!

I just got this e-mail. I dunno guys, do you think I should go for it?! Ha!

Hi, do you sell Portrait painting?
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Size 50 cm x 60 cm only $50
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Head Trip

I’m working on my underpainting now which is done with just burnt umber. When I work I am focusing on forms and the intensity of shadows, but when I step back to look at the big picture for a moment, it’s really weird to see my own face appearing!