This is a quick sketch om my grandson Daniel. If I were to do a portrait in oils my first job is to draw the reference photo a few times to get a better feel for features and shapes. You get to know your subject much better and find little things that make him who he is and after all that is what you need capture, a personality as well as a likeness.
The studio is getting full of paintings in every state of finish, my new thing is trying to paint portraits. Now this is a challenging thing for me as I'm a rather rough painter full of texture most of my work. When it comes to smooth surfaces I do have a bit of a problem. I need to practice more and do some work with smoothing the mix and probably using more sable brushes. There are techniques for the under painting like not so much paint and more thinners; I generally do paint what they call... what's the word ala prima? finish the work as you go....Hmmmm
I generally paint to get it down on the canvas then fix it should it need fixing. The interesting thing is with my eye sight problems and the glasses I do get in trouble should I not "step back" and view my work from a distance, The glasses with try focal lenses do distort things a bit and the fact that my left eye is not a player. I have that lazy eye birth defect so I'm a one eyed Jack of a painter.
The funny thing is prospective with only one eye doing all the work. And for a painter some strokes from pallet to the canvas is guesswork. You have a nice full brush of paint on a stick and try to target that spot so carefully and you just don't hit the canvas right sometimes with your first try.... your brush point just gets closer and closer and you finally land somewhere near where you intended... a bit discouraging but you can do this thing, I'd call trial and error...Me thinks more errors but then it's oil paint and you can recover rather well...if you step back and look that is.
When painting you get so involved in the work concentrating on whatever spots you are working you get lost in the work. I did one painting of a clam shack and worked the door to this thing so intently and then stepped back. Well I was surprised to see I left out a corner of the building...Not a big thing and easy to fix but I was fascinated that I did such a thing without realizing what was going on, That doorway problem like the shadows inside the building from the open doorway had my full attention and nothing else existed. Hmmm I should really step back more than I do.
Now this portrait thing is a different story all together. And yes I am reading and doing the work of studying features. I've painted the eye and nose the mouth on practice sheets to get the forms and muscles; all the how to things you should get down before you do a portrait. There is so much to it, the measuring can drive you nuts and that one I'm not very good at. Don't get me wrong I can measure with the best of them, and know that a scale not a ruler is what you measure with. I'd done the drafting bit quite a lot over the years so it's not that type of problem. What is the issue is my style of going for finish rather than plotting and planning to a result. I seem to paint rather directly and get caught up in the details way too quickly in a painting.
I suppose I should develop a technique rather than go along with my "style" of painting. I hate that term and they"the other artist" say I have a distinctive 'style". It means to me that you're not quite up to a level others might be... hmmm. Style is what you want to achieve but it's all about the work and how good it is rather than how stylish it is. I'd rather not have a style per SE but have my work recognized by it's quality. But then I'm learning how to paint and some day might be halfway decent, but in my mind I have along way to go.... so now I head out to the studio....That's not too far....not such a long way that is...
