Since I have been recently painting many Indian people, especially women, I decided that I want to paint my friend Paridhi because I know her story and her well, and just generally want to work on my painting style and composition. I found Thomas Donaldson online and immediately fell in love with his work, and especially this head study. I think that instead of going full on abstract expressionist, I will instead focus on further color theory and brush strokes. I'm super excited for this piece!
The lips were kind of a disaster, so I left them just completely shadows and I think it worked kind of well? The nose wasn't super difficult to complete, and much to my surprise, the left side of the face was, in my opinion, the easiest to do. I just dragged the dark umber to the general shadows of my face and it worked quite well. I also introduced a bit of purple which seemed to add a lot to the piece, and am thinking that I may just leave it like this with more of a rough finish towards the end. I am worried about how I will resolve the eyebrow portion, but I am going to plan that out by looking more of Cambria's work.
I have made some progress with the face and the outlines. After filling in the shadow of the eye like Cambria's, it kind of became clear how I need to go about this painting. Instead of focusing on an entire area, I needed to go by square inch and work very closely with thin layers as I go across the painting. I immediately found that it helped to start with my very dark shadows, and gradually apply the lighter colors on top. I am terrified to start the lips because I don't know how to do dark shadows and dark highlights together and am worried that it will ruin the whole piece but we shall see. Also, I am concerned that it doesn't look like me at all and will end up looking very dark, but I will try and work on it :).
This painting actually proved to be much harder than Anaiya's piece. I began with a wayy too dark underpainting and therefore the skin color became muddled very quickly, so I scraped off the underpainting completely and began again. Also, the shadows in this face were much deeper than Anaiya's and due to the older face there were simply more lines to paint. The most tricky challenge was the headscarf of the sari. Since it is see through, I had to not only apply proper lines of pink, but I had to add back in the colors of her face and throat in order for it to look real. I think I didn't do a great job on the right side of the sari's headscarf, but I tried really hard on the left section. After this piece was complete, I actually went back and added a drop shadow in both pieces in order to show a more dynamic piece.
I've started my piece!! After Cambria's heavy inspo, I decided that I wanted to keep the general style of the painting very similar, but instead use my face and different strokes of a brush. Very quickly, I realized that the mistake I made by modeling my painting after Cambria's is that his was done on a wood board, which means that the bottom layer of color was very thin and acted almost like the canvas color rather than wet paint to work on. Therefore, during this process I had to often scrape off my work, and start again with thinner layers. Next time, I think I will use a cardboard palette because it works better since it soaks out the oil and allows me to have better use of my colors without it drying very quickly.
SKIN COMPLEXION!!!! I took an interesting route for this piece this time. Compared to my grandfather's piece, I actually tried to purposefully create and underpainting that matched my reference photo and then began to add lights. The most interesting part of this process was definitely using the new medium that I bought at Plaza. It works quite similar to turpentine but has a luster that I literally absolutely fell in love with. Also, I definitely struggled with the clothing and the hair because I was working with wet paint which made it hard to create highlights on such dark backgrounds. Overall, this piece has taught me SO much about working with brown skin in general and one of my goals was to figure out how to make skin color look more warm and so I learned from Ryland to have a pinkish orangey underpainting. Although I don't love this piece nearly as much as my palette knife paintings, I still like the interesting brush work and the fact that it isn't as realistic.
I have completed the bruneille underpainting of my first portrait, and am not exactly happy with the way it turned out because of the slightly messed up proportions. Next week, I want to heavily work on the application of glazes of paint and hopefully will make progress on the actual painting progress. After a conversation with Coach Hall, I have decided that I will not be going on a completely realistic path and I am excited to see how that turns out.
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Authormy name is shreya. Archives
June 2021
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