carrying on with more of "dan", a new painting, and life painting session

the penultimate "bookman dan"

i have done just  a little more on the portrait of dan and i think i am going to let it sit for a while. i believe i'm on the road to over doing it and i may already have given it a wash or two too many. so i'm close to finishing it and will revisit in a week or so. here we are at present:

i warmed up the shadows on the light side of his face and cooled off the ones on the shadow side. some scarlet lake heavy with cadmium orange for the former and ultramarine for the later. some details on hsi shirt such as shadows and stitching were painted with a gray made from cerulean blue, alizarin crimson permanent, and raw sienna .  all this painted with a #16 cosmotop round. i will probably darken his sweater and the inferior rim of his *right* glasses frame (while still letting it fade into the shadow beside his nose). but as i said above...next week.....maybe.

for this next project i have picked out this photo that i took in santa fe a couple of years ago. this first has been cropped to about what i want the painting to include and to manage the composition. the second is a black and white enlarged to be about the size of the head on the actual painting. this was done to facilitate the drawing which can now be done sort of "sight-sized".

i drew the figure and most of the background elements on a piece of  16"X20", 140#, fabriano artistico hot press paper. i started the painting process with a light wash of cerulean blue, scarlet lake, and cadmium yellow-orange(holbein) applied with a #26 cosmotop round brush.

drawing and initial wash

first features

after this was bone dry, i started on the features with mixtures of the same colors used for the starting light wash and switching to a #16 round. i usually start with the nose or eyes. in this case i started with her *left* eye and then moved on to the nose and finally up to the *right*eye. i wasn't so concerned with getting the value right immediately but with getting the shapes correct and connected to each other. in pursuit of this i tried to make each area look like a miniature painting when viewed up close. this was a point made by ted nuttall in a recent workshop. i have included a detail view of her *left* eye. some darker areas within the hairline, around the earrings, and some modeling of her cheeks and chin finished work today on the figure. i also started putting some of the background predominantly cerulean blue at the lower right corner of the painting and again to the left of the hair

detail #1 of features

detail #2 of *left* eye

a few more features and modeling on the face in "let me count the ways"

35-minute pose; 13"X10"

and lastly today one of the offerings from the life drawing/painting session at the vitamin studio from last week. one was terrible and is deposited in the circular file, another the model liked and so i gave it to her (it just felt like the right thing to do at the time and she was thrilled....or so it seemed). that left me with this last sketch that was of her head and upper torso and done over the course of a 35 minute pose.