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These pictures illustrate progressive stages of this glazed oil portrait. The use of thin glazes to tint an established tonal base results in rich luminous colors. I am not strictly driven by a formula. I am constantly trying out new approaches so as to achieve different results. Progress in new paintings will be periodically posted with descriptions of the methods I used Artistic Process Over the years, the process I use has evolved from pleine air painting, to working mostly in the studio using digital photographs I have taken as my reference source. I like working from my photography because I can capture a real world moment in time. This is especially useful in portraiture. Many people put on a false pose when they are sitting for a portrait. I guess that is why they don't perceive of themselves as being photogenic. There are two way of overcoming this problem. You can either paint them from life or work from many candid photographs. When painting from life, the artist can average out natural expressions over a period of time. I prefer to use photographs because I can readily capture an animated moment in time. Having collected my reference materials, I use my computer to produce an image from which I work. Sometimes I layer various exposure settings and even parts of unrelated photographs to achieve a final working image. When I am going to use a plain background in a portrait, I insert an average color into the digital image. It is much quicker for me to paint the type of background illustrated above straight out of my head. I then manipulate them directly on the canvas, wet in wet, to better balance the portrait's composition. I work straight off my laptop rather than a printed copy. I can continue to manipulate the image as I paint. I can zoom in or out to see details and use various paint effects to remove minute detail. A printed photograph often looses depth in the shadows. By digitally playing with contrast and tone, I can reproduce what I recall having observed. When working from photographs, it is particularly important to constantly study how we see light as it reflects off objects. In our minds we usually interpret colors, rather than seeing exactly what the light is doing to the color. A good example of this is of a white surface facing the sky in the shade on a sunny day. If you ask most any one, they will tell you that it looks white, but if you carefully study the actual color, it is a shade of blue, reflecting the color of the sky above. Pale colors take on reflected colors near by. Composition is very important for the success of a painting. Having studied classical composition, I now study how my eye moves across the image I am producing. I usually take photographs at high resolution and frame them much larger than I need for the painting. Then I work towards a good composition by cropping the original photograph. In the end,it is not the technology used that produces a successful painting, rather it is the life experience and soul of an artist that is skillfully expressed using paint on canvas.
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In most of my oil paintings, I paint glaze tints over a carefully painted tonal under painting. I find that most store bought canvases are too absorbent for this method to work well. So I start by undercoating the canvas board with yellow ochre acrylic paint, heavily diluted with a flat acrylic gel medium. To get an explanation of each step, click on each of the images to the left. From time to time I will show the stages of another painting. More later ...
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