Oil Head Study

Here's a head study that I painted in oil yesterday during a six hour session at Garin Baker's Carriage House Art Studio. It's 11x14 inches on a canvas covered panel.


Here's an early step in the process. I laid the structure of the face with a bristle brush on the light gray oil-primed canvas. My goal at this stage was to work out the darks-- especially the shadow side of the face and the background.

The shadows are fairly transparent, just scrubbed in with bristle brushes. The light side of the form is just the priming color showing through. This is the foundation of the portrait, so I spend a little time checking and correcting, because it's hard (but not impossible) to fix drawing mistakes later.

Now the light side, with all its halftones, is dropped in with patchy, partially mixed colors applied loosely. I was consciously grouping the values on the light, keeping them all lighter, closer in value and less saturated than they appeared. The danger is to overmodel and oversaturate the lights. I also consciously kept the shadow areas fairly flat and grouped, because we all have a tendency to overstate reflected lights.

(By the way, if any of these terms or concepts don't make sense, let me know, and I can try to do a post about it in the future.)

I spent the last three hours fine-tuning forms and adjusting edges. I left off the highlights, eyebrows, eyelashes, nostrils, and all those other final touches until the very end. They should be dropped in after the soft understructure is finished.
Carriage House Art Studio