Of portraits and figures

Here is something I thought I would never do and that is paint a portrait and/or figure.  Not because I dislike people, but because I didn't think I would be able to do it.  I still don't know if I will be able to do it but now I hope so.  Believe it or not, the two paintings are of the same girl.  My class did the full body painting one week and then the portrait the next.  According to my wife, the poor girl looks like a long haired man holding a knife in the full body painting.  I can't say I disagree with her.

I am somewhat happy with the portrait painting so far.  I also enjoyed doing it.  I am still struggling with getting the three dimensional look but I think I am a lot closer with this portrait.  I mixed up three shades of the skin tone to represent the highlights, mid-tones and shadow.  From a few feet back she actually looks somewhat 3D.  I will work on it in the coming weeks using reference photos I took at the end of the class.  I hope I can really learn to do a decent portrait.

I learned that in painting, just like photography, that lighting is key.  We had horrible overhead fluorescent lighting that really gave very little modeling to the girl.  I can see when doing portraits or a still life or anything really, that lighting is very important.  I knew that it was for photography but it is just as important to painting and for the same reasons.  It is the light we are trying to capture after all.

The color matrix - final update

I finally finished the warm color matrix last night. I finished the shades for the tertiary colors. This has been quite the exercise but it has been well worth it. Now I have some idea how to get the color I want. This matrix provides 84 different colors, shades and tints but there are still lots of colors this matrix doesn't cover. For now this gives me a good start. I will, at some point in the future, do this again for the cool colors.

When I do this again, I will start off more slowly on the tints. There is a big difference between the pure color and the first tint which was done at a 1:1 mix of the pure color and Titanium white. Next time I will start with a 2:1 ratio of the pure color to titanium white. The shades don't use the ratio I marked along the side. When you start shading (darkening) a color, it darkens quickly. It doesn't take much of the complementary color to really darken a color so it is best to add just a very little bit, mix it up and then add more if needed. Just like the saying goes in carpentry, measure twice and cut once, in paint mixing, start light and work toward darker. Once you darken it, you can't lighten it again. Well, technically you can because you can add more of the original color you are trying to darken but it will take a lot of that color to lighten it again.

The warm color matrix