Working Quickly And Staying ArtBusy

A One Day Portrait Workshop

One Eye is rather nice

Last week I had a one day Landscape Workshop, now this week I had a one day Portrait Workshop. Intense! We had a live model for the Portrait class.

The Instructor started with a value demo of the model, using only black and white (his work not pictured here). His value demo was very quick and he did not go into detail, more of a light and shadow pattern - I would call it "massed in."

With my first value study, I struggled. I was not happy with the Canvas Paper -- the paint would not move around and the paper felt dry and it was hard to apply my paint. I think we had 30 minutes to complete this value study. I focused perhaps too hard on getting features placed on a new-to-me model. I also did not have a good view, too little of the right side of the face-that was a struggle.

Better Value Study

The next pose for a value study was much kinder to me, an almost full face frontal. I loved the shadow side of the face, there was a strong shadow from the nose onto the cheek.  I like the nose and mouth here too. A much more successful value study.

For the last pose of the day, we brought out the color! Finally! We used a Zorn limited palette which included Titanium White, Ivory Black, Yellow Ochre and Scarlet Lake. I was curious to try Scarlet Lake which was an Orange Red -somehow seemingly a bit brighter than Cadmium Red Medium.

A few nice areas, still imperfect.

Unfortunately I had the bad corner again and I struggled with the short shadow side of the face--I do not know why this tests me so!Ugh! I was happy with the left eye that I painted and with the colors I was able to achieve with the limited palette. I was able to achieve the glow of her red hair, the light skin tone and the orangey mouth color. Again, the time constraints on these paintings were incredibly limiting. This painting is not done. I do not have enough paint down, I do not like the top of head shape, that shadow side really bugs me. I may work on this a little bit to correct a few things, maybe. While I dislike the overall painting, look at the eye closeup, I think it reads well and is accurate in shape, form and color. So one teeny segment looks nice!

This close up is lovely, if only this eye section was the painting! 

Overall, and once again, a one day intense art workshop is good to kick start creativity and painting! I needed to go back to the basics of value studies and limited palette in order to move forward and I need to figure out that three quarter face view. If you are like me, a workshop will never lead to your best work but it is motivating and there is always more to learn!