Tag: portrait

drawings · portraits

“Marisol” portrait from life

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I just started attending this art group that meets once a week (more or less) and draws or paints a volunteer model. It’s a wonderful group of people and allows us all to get some valuable practice from life!

I often harp on how important drawing from life is. Photos don’t capture things the way they really are—not quite. I don’t mind using photo references, I won’t be ashamed of using them, but at the same time I realize how important drawing from life is!

I hope to bring my paints to one of these sessions, as other artists have. We have an hour of model time (one pose) so that should be enough time to do something!

Very, very excited about this.

Last week’s model was “Marisol” who came with her adorable little dog, who was a rescue. The dog was nervous but at the same time, a great model! As was Marisol. I used the first two 20-minute pose sessions to draw Marisol, then used the last 20-minute pose to draw her and the dog. Here are the results:

“Marisol” drawn from life, 8″ x11-1/2″ in my sketchbook.

 

“Marisol” and her little dog. 20 minute pose.
drawings · figures & nudes · portraits

More figure drawings! (Some nudity, may be NSFW)

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Time for more figure drawings! For a very long time, ever since I took my first figure drawing class at age 18, I’ve kept returning to life drawing classes and sessions. This kind of drawing discipline helps keep skills sharp. You have to draw the model in front of you—no time for lots of erasing and fussing, as the model won’t stay still forever!

Portrait of Young Woman, from life. 8-1/2″x11″ graphite on sketch paper

And here are a few more sketches from a nude model. These sketches are usually done from 15-30-minute poses. Never longer than 30 minutes.

Approximately a 20-30 minute pose.

The above sketch is available for sale on DailyPaintworks.

Seated Nude, quick sketch, in pencil

And yet another!

 

portraits

“Intense” oil sketch 6×8″

J R Dunster1 Comment
“Intense” 6×8 inches, oil on panel

This is a small painting I did on a Raymar panel several months ago. From my “novela” series, I continue to explore different expressions and emotions in these portrait sketches. I love Raymar panels, by the way. This is the simple acrylic-primed panel with a semi-smooth texture (for portraiture).

Another aim of this portrait sketch was to try to be less “fussy” (obsessed with picky details) in my painting technique. This attempt was partially successful.

paintings · portraits

Zorn Study with Soho Oil Paints

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Zorn Palette Study w/ Soho Oil Paints

One of the things I like to do sometimes is to see how “low can I go”? I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean in price and affordability, not necessarily quality.

Soho Oil Colors, sold exclusively in the USA by Jerry’s Artarama and ASW (sister companies) is touted as an affordable student paint with a buttery consistency. I have tried several tubes because the prices can be soooo tempting. If you wait for a sale, you can get a large 170 mL tube for about $4-5 dollars!

But it’s a budget paint. They don’t promise artist-grade quality for that price. However, if you choose your colors carefully and mix with higher grade paints (Lukas Studio will do, as well as the ever-popular Winsor & Newton Artist Oil Colors, Old Holland, Blockx, and so forth) you can do pretty well.

For this little oil study, I thought I’d use several stronger colors from Soho and add a higher quality white. The colors I chose were:

  • Michael Harding Titanium White
  • Soho Light Red (an iron earth red/brown)
  • Soho Yellow Ochre
  • Soho Ivory Black

This is sometimes called the “Zorn Palette” because it uses a very limited palette consisting of an earth red/brown, an earth yellow, black, and white. A cool black (like Ivory) can almost create the illusion of a blue, if mixed right.

What I like about using this palette is that you can save a lot of money, use only a few colors, yet get a “full color” painting. This palette can work very well for portraits.

 

paintings · portraits

Emo Boy – a limited palette study

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Emo Boy, oil on 4×5 inch panel. Stock photo credit http://fav.me/d45j276

Thank you to XXMAUROXX on DeviantArt for the use of his stock photo in making this painting. It’s not that good of a likeness; I was going more for an attitude or “feel” here.

I’m going to start doing some studies and exercises in the limited palette. This painting is loosely based on the Goya Palette (similar to the Zorn palette). I used Titanium/Zinc White, Mars Red, Yellow Ochre, and Lamp Black to make this painting. It was a good way to study color mixing! I had to try to create the illusion of greenish-grey (his 5-O’clock shadow) through mixing black, white, and a little yellow. (The black I used had a coolish tint.) The red of the lips and the nose weren’t true cherry red, but earthy red. When seen in contrast with the other more subdued colors, it looks far “redder” than it otherwise might be. That’s the exciting thing about painting with a limited palette.

Tutorials · Tutorials

TUTORIAL: Evolution of a painting “Suspicion.” Step by step in oils

J R Dunster5 Comments

I thought I’d show my process of painting, as well as demonstrate how digital tools like Photoshop can be a time-saver and life-saver for an artist. Sure, I’m an old-school traditional painter, but that doesn’t mean I’ll turn my back on new technology completely!

(Click on the thumbnail to see a bigger picture.) Some progress paintings for “Suspicion,” oil on 8×8″ linen panel.

  1. Probably 3/4 done. Eyes are too high up on the face. (Checking in Photoshop helped me see this.) Highlights (on cheek and chin) are too bright and harsh. He’s got a wall eye (on our right side, the eye is looking off in a different direction.)
  2. Much better. Eyes a bit too big (but I didn’t really mind that). “Muzzle” of face (mouth, chin, under nose) is pushed out too much. Makes him look slightly ape-like. That will not do!
  3. Almost done. Eye on our right still strays a bit too much. Area around the mouth not quite to my liking. Creases above eyebrows not quite correct.
  4. A few more tweaks. Fixed highlight above upper lip. Reshaped the lower lip a bit. Tiny bit of adjustment to eye direction.

I don’t usually photograph my paintings when I’m in the middle of working on them. (I will have to do that sometime in the future for tutorial purposes.) So unfortunately I don’t have a picture of this painting in its beginning stages. So this is the best I can do—to show how I can go off the rails with details and proportions, and how eventually I get things set to order in the end. It’s almost always a gradual, ongoing process.

Part of my “problem” is that I paint (“draw”) freehand. 😉 By that I mean, no grids, no tracing a photograph. I like to draw and paint from life (the model sitting in front of me) when my schedule allows, and without reasonable freehand drawing skills, that simply wouldn’t be possible. So being overly dependent on drawing aids was never much of an option. I find that my drawing speed is reasonably efficient and it only gets better, the more I practice.

Some artists (particularly portrait artists) are very accomplished and can produce something fabulous-looking within a short amount of time. But I’m not one of those artists. 😉 Yes, I can paint relatively fast(ish) and can produce something okay-looking in an hour or so. But those little details and flaws that can break a painting—they afflict me! Rarely do I paint something “perfect” in one sitting. I wish it were so . . . oh how I wish it were so!

My primary drawing aid of choice is the computer and Adobe Photoshop. If I see problems with a painting-in-progress (and I always do), I make notes of what needs to be corrected and keep these notes with me for when I work on the painting again. This helps me keep out a sharper eye for areas where I tend to have difficulties. If I traced (or used a grid with lots of tight little squares) every time I painted something, how would I learn where my problem areas in drawing were?

So, I have to let a painting sit for a day or two, let it simmer on my brain’s back burner, and then I can see where I’m going wrong. The computer helps me find problem areas. Sizing the artwork down to thumbnail size helps me see how it would look from a distance. (This is vital!) Flopping it (mirror image) in Photoshop helps me see where things are off-center or slanting to one side or the other. (They always are. Always.) Before I had Photoshop I would hold up the painting to a mirror. I sometimes still do this if I’m in the midst of working on it and sense something is off. Some artists have a mirror with them in their studio at all times, just for this purpose.

paintings · portraits

Eyeliner – an oil sketch

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This time, I’ve got a little 4×4 inch oil sketch. Not much to say about this, other than it was fun to paint and has a little looser style for me. I studied some fashion illustration in art school, so I sometimes enjoy painting glamour or fashion faces. I hope I can paint more with this loose style in the future.


“Eyeliner” 4×4 inches, oil on panel. 

The fun thing about this painting is that I used a little wood panel that I’d primed with a lead-based oil foundation. For those of you who are not painters, this means absolutely nothing, so you can stop reading now. 😉

I sealed the panel with this acrylic glue-like stuff (Golden Brand “GAC 100” acrylic medium). Then I covered the panel with a few coats of M. Harding’s “Foundation White,” a lead-based white paint that can be used for priming canvases and panels. I liked the surface for painting and will be using more of this stuff. And don’t worry, I was careful with the evil lead paint. I didn’t eat any of it or anything!

paintings · portraits

Flowing Hair

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A shout-out to Gifsandstock at DeviantArt for letting me use their fab stock photo as reference!

flowing hair

“Flowing Hair,” oil on cradled wood panel, 6×6 inches. This image is cropped. Click to see it uncropped.

I was struck by the stock photo (by Gifsandstock!) and wanted to do a painting inspired by the moody photo. I hope it turned out okay. I’m always learning something about how to mix colors, apply paint, and so forth. So much more to learn! So much more practice to do! But then every artist (if they’re being honest with themselves) will tell you the same thing!

paintings · portraits

“Suspicion” portrait study in oil

J R Dunster2 Comments

Another in my series of paintings exploring human expression and emotion, inspired by those melodramatic Spanish-language soap operas. (So much crying and angst! So over-the-top! So campy! I love this stuff!) Other paintings in this series are “Sad Tears,”  “Sideway Glance, and Roger.”

I started working on this series because I needed the practice (an interesting excuse to paint little portrait studies) and I thought the challenge of trying to capture the expressions was a needed exercise. Plus I love those Spanish soaps! I started watching them years ago (off and on) and they really have helped with my Spanish comprehension.

“Suspicion” oil on oil-primed linen, 8×8 inches.

I used SourceTek‘s fantastic oil-primed linen. Oh my word, I can’t say enough about SourceTek. When I put the first brushstrokes down on an oil-primed SourceTek panel, I stopped and went, “Whoa!” Kind of like if I’d eaten an especially luscious piece of chocolate. It was that sublime. You just had to be there. The way it took the paint, the texture . . . *sigh* Seriously, I’m in love with these panels. I’ve also got a nice little order of oil-primed linen from RayMar, and I anticipate a similar reaction.

I use good quality paints of various brands. Some of them standard quality “artist grade” (like Winsor & Newton’s Artist Oils and Grumbacher’s Pre-Tested) but I also have some heady, high-end super-duper fancy oil paints. Like Vasari. Sigh and say it with me . . . Vasari.

Vasari is super rich, super smooth, and super-expensive. I had Yellow Ochre (a cheaper pigment) on my palette when I worked on this painting. Other colors (from less expensive brands) were Alizarin Crimson (Permanent variety), Cadmium Red Light, Ultramarine Blue, Prussian Blue, Red Iron Oxide, Naples Yellow, Burnt Carmine (Rembrandt brand—I LOVE this color!), and a Titanium-Zinc White.

Some day I’ll devote a whole blog post to some of my favorite paint brands, as well as more about the colors I like best. But not in this post.

This painting was started several months ago, was shelved as I got sidetracked with other things, and then I returned to it. There was some fussing and fiddling that went into it (getting the proportions of the head correct took a little longer than it should have) but finally I think it’s done. I feel like the painting style here harks back a little bit too much to my illustration roots (I studied illustration in art school) but that’s okay. I’m simply glad to have it done. Onto the next painting!