Practice 3: Portraits

I was quite enthused to start portraits. The human face seems to be something challenging, having so many features and slight angles and lines created from the bone and muscle beneath. I was anxious to learn the relationships of the face and learn a foundation of how to begin this challenge. While watching the demo before starting our own portraits, I began thinking how intriguing it would be to be able to see the x-rays of paintings. Viewers only see the final product of a painting, but they do not see all the steps and stages it takes to reach that point. Many artist may prefer this, but I think it is so intriguing being able to follow a person's thoughts and signs of growth or understanding of something by following the process it took for them to reach a point. Anyway, after learning some basic principles of the face and given direction on how to begin we got started on our canvases.

The first day I was in a painting mood, and was just having fun applying the paint to my canvas. I experimented with colors and application to understand how they could work together to for flesh. I didn't get too caught up in accuracy of both color and form at this point (seen in stages 1-5), but rather I just was going through more of an experimentation period. 

After our first short critique, which was focused mainly on the colors that made up each of our complexion, I then went back and put real consideration and thought to what I was seeing and continued more in this manner. Though I missed photo documentation of many of the steps in this shift, I not only payed closer attention to the colors of my flesh but also the forms that were making up my face. A big chunk of the paintings progression was done on my third day of work, where I was able to get into a focused state of mind and let myself be enthralled in the piece, which is why many of the intermediate stages seem to be missing.

 

stage 1:drew main construction of face

stage 2: brought in color 

stage 3:filled in space between color

stage 4: blending and started giving attention
to some facial features

stage 5: began eyes

stage 6: skipping ahead quite a few stages,
after dealing with the color of complexion,
 along with other colors of facial features
 like lips, and also beginning to think about
 the background

stage 7: continued work on background

stage 8: blurred background