Portrait Project Final Piece

Unfortunately I forgot to bring in my camera so I don’t have progress shots for this one.

 Final piece background

I started off with the background, mixing a pale brown and then painting over it with gesso to give it a paler tone and to make it easier to paint over. Then I painted in the background, stating with the sky and the mountains, then adding the foreground, the village and the white details of the snow and the clouds. I painted the foreground in a very thin wash and allowed the paint from the foreground to run to give the background a loose, expressive feel. I took a bit of inspiration from the Dan Bayles paintings I'd looked at in the treatment of the landscape, because I wanted it to have a similarly ethereal feel as his work does. The clouds and the village I painted in much thicker paint so they would stand out and to add to the painterly, expressive effect I wanted to give the background.

The foreground, the portrait itself, proved a lot more difficult. I tried to trace the rough positions of features using an overhead projector but things kept jogging it making it difficult to put things in the right place.

With my first attempt at painting the portrait, I added a layer of black stippled shading to try to capture the shadow in the photograph, but that didn’t seem right. My second attempt turned out like this (after several re-tries with the eyes, nose and lips).

The eyes still need some work and the lips were in the wrong place, but the style of the shading was better, especially around the nose.

With a bit more work it ended up like this. I’m still not entirely happy with the eyes or the mouth but it looks less chubby and the shading looks a lot less harsh. I’m particularly happy with the nearer eye and the light on the earring. For the shading and blending here, I wnet back and looked at some of the artists I'd researched and how they treated blending in skin. I took a lot of inspiration from Guy Denning, not in the colours but in the way he uses his brushstrokes and little flecks of different colours to create a varied tone.

As I say, I'm not completely satisfied with the result, but since I've never tried painting in a realistic style before I'm fairly pleased with bits of it.