Our winter painting class is off to a GREAT start! We have 2 sessions going, a Thursday night session and a Sunday morning group. Our models are holding the same pose for 2 weeks, giving us an opportunity to develop a painting, but mostly to increase our ability to LOOK. The first week we drew with pencil to get a feel for the pose then we switched into simple painting with burnt umber. By the end of the night we had the figure established on the canvas with the light and dark areas blocked in.
This first look at form made our job the second week a lot easier when we started to apply color. The first thing we did was make corrections by looking at our paintings backwards with a small hand mirror. Next we laid out a simple palette of colors, cad yellow medium, cad red light, french blue, cobalt blue ,burnt umber and white. I would have liked to have had yellow ochre as well but didn't. I started in the shadows, cooling off my flesh tones with a mild mix of cobalt blue into my flesh colors of white, cad yellow and a pinch of cad red light. After I laid in shadow colors, I started to address the flesh colors in light, which was most of this portrait, I had flat lighting being set up beind the light. As the night went on, the models face became a touch redder in color, I liked to be able to add as much red and other colors as possible to the face.
Demo in the sunday morning class, setting up the palette and starting by premixing some colors.
