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Stage 4
Not a whole lot of time for me during this class: one student missed last week and I had to catch her up a bit.
Though this isn't totally relevant to moving this demo along, I'd like to include this bracketed "aside," just to illustrate how specific students' problems can become:
[It's an interesting circumstance with this particular student, because I kept noticing her laying down paint and then wiping it off again - not because of a mistake; it looked like she was trying to blend layers or something. The whole head was becoming one middle value. Then it dawned on me. She had mentioned that she took a "Renaissance Painting" class last semester in which the instructor had her painting a grisaille and then laying in color in translucent glazes. (From what I understand, the Renaissance artists used a combination of glazing and opaque layers. The only artist I really know of to truly glaze everything was Maxfield Parrish - and he had to essentially develop a personal system in order to do this; it was truly unprecedented.) I finally had to demonstrate on her painting how much paint we needed on there to truly "build" the lights into the head. She is (fortunately) a pretty direct person, so I just came right out and said, "...and this class is not Renaissance Painting." At the end of class, she was over that hurdle.]
Now, back to the demo---
I began by altering the "drawing" of her features even more - pushing toward a better likeness. Coming back fresh to the subject, I always can see this aspect of the portrait better as opposed to an hour into it, where I'm focused more on color and value.
I built up value and warmth in the top planes even further in the lights. Notice the difference in contrast between this week and last. I dry-scumbled some more warm colors in the forehead plane. This is essentially brushing "dry" paint over the dry surface. Oftentimes, I use my fingers to "push" these highly chromatic colors into the surface after a bit of scumbling. It gives the surface a porcelain-like translucency. Please don't have a sandwich while doing this. This is one of the dangers inherent in using cadmiums. Don't worry about me - there's a sink right there, and I wash up immediately.
I noticed that I knocked out that little bit of light creeping into the shadow plane on her cheek. Too much, I feel. I'll add that back next week - though subtly. I painted in the headband loosely, hoping I could get away with leaving the underpainting to describe the hair underneath the mesh. I'm not sure that it's working yet. I hope to get into her eyes next week, and refine some specifics there. I'm going to hit the whole thing with some retouch varnish the day before class to push the darks into their proper values, so that I can refine contrast properly. [As many of you know, dark flesh tones/earth colors dry quite flat, and the value moves up almost a half-step. The retouch "refreshes" those darks.]
I'm posting a closeup, just so you might see some of the transitions more closely.
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