continuing on with the "center-piece" and new painting start

over the last few days i have worked quite a bit on this painting but not a lot of it is very obvious. i did a lot of fussing with the faces. doing some subtle modeling on the guys face in shadow that shows on the photo, and correcting some drawing (or painting, not sure which) problems around her nose, eye, and far cheek. one of these days i will take stock of the drawing a little more before plunging into the painting to avoid this picky stuf that probably in the long run means little. i also put down some serial glazes on the back ground to bring it up to value and hue that i want. basically i'd like some glow that is still somewhat greenish around the heads and darker in the upper corners and edges. i think that the overall value is about what i am aiming for but i need to get the greenish coloration down. i think some winsor blue/ultramarine blue/cobalt blue or even cerulean over this predominantly yellowish hue we see here would work. these glazes are put down with my #26 round cosmotop brush and about 15% solution of color to water. there is a coating of permanent rose, quinacridone yellow, and winsor blue already on it. i 
decided to make the bench a greyish color to emulate weathered wood, which is departure from the metal that it actually is, and started this process by putting a burnt sienna and ultramarine blue wash over much of its surface. a little more of the modeling of the shadows and folds on the shirts and woman's hat and a few of the "squares" of color on the guy's shirt finished out where we are to date. i am probably at the point where i am going to have to put in the rest of the pattern on both of their shirts. i will need a good night's rest to tackle this (and maybe even a break of a couple of days). so far i have managed not to screw this up....hopefully my luck will continue.

to get a little bit of a break before attempting the shirt patterns above i decided to start another smaller painting of my oldest and, arguably, dearest friend. he is always smiling and i have a photo of him from his blog . he is currently a volunteer for the peace corps in njala, sierra leonne, teaching english teaching to classes of university students learning to be teachers. i just can't say enough about this endeavor and am very proud to know him.

i started out by deciding on the composition where i wanted to get his head high on the paper and almost centered. i imported his blog photo to photoshop and cropped it and enlarged it so that it was "real" sized and composed as above. with that out of the way i drew the image on a piece of 300# hot press arches paper measuring 15"X11".

using my #16 cosmotop round (this has become my go to workshorse lately) brush i put sown a wash of varied colors including scarlet lake, cadmium yellow orange (holbein doesn't make a pure cad. orange), and  cerulean blue. i tried and was mostly successful in avoiding the highlights in his eyes and t-shirt. when this ws slightly dry i put in a darker value hair shape using burnt umber and cobalt blue.



this needed complete drying before moving on to the features. using the same colors and brush, i started the features on the *left* eye. switching to cobalt blue i painted the iris after finishing most of the surrounding structures. i then moved on to the nose. as i continue it will be challenge to stick with what is actually seen in the dark shadow to the *right* of his nose, i.e. nothing, as opposed to what i know is there. the modeling of the face, start of the mouth, and some of the background were also painted at this sitting. i want to keep the whole thing moving along at more or less the same stages in all aspects of the painting. i think i will stop at this point today.