Kim

[Sharon Knettell]

John, your post was very thoughtful.

I have been rummaging my brain for information that could help you. Mari's last post was extraordinarily helpful. I think you should bite the bullet and go the atelier route if you can. I am primarily self-taught except for the two miserable years I spent at The Boston Museum School. I would have killed for the ateliers they have today.

Never be intimidated by age or circumstance. After toiling in the fields of commercial art for many years I decided to teach myself portraiture starting in my 40's.

Point of view is the single most valuable painting tool. Skillfull paintings without content can be just greeting cards. Read Chogyam Trungpa's "Dharma Art" (Shambala). He is the reason I still paint. I am not proseletizing here. Trungpa gives the most consise defintions of the process of visual perception I have ever read. His discussions on the purpose, power and necessity of aesthetics are profound. He discusses the importance of craftmanship and reverence for ones painting tools.

Nuts and Bolts: or not putting the cart before the horse. (My major failing.)

A.Drawing. Draw as much as you can from life. Learn classical proportions. If you don't know them I will try to describe them or attempt a scan. This is the backbone of painting. I'm not totally sure about anatomy. To quote Ingres "C'est science affreuse." (any French help here?)

B.Learn your mediums. Investigate brushes,paint etc.. Peg Baumgartner says never use cheap quality anything even when you are learning. Keep on hand "The Artist's Handbook of Materials and Techniques " by Ralph Mayer.http://www.portraitartist.com/bookstore/materials.htm

C.Work in natural daylight even if you have to put up a tent. White only. There are color balanced lights you can use to augment daylight.

Some final notes. I will be giving a more consise breakdown of my methods of photography in the photo thread. However here are a few tips to get you going. Do not shoot in open daylight with the subject facing the sun. Pray for overcast days. The subtle illumination is beautiful,the skin tones saturated as the clouds act as a filter. Take advantage of open shade, i.e., under trees. When shooting outdoors if you are near or under trees use an skylight IB filter to get rid of the greens. I only use two Nikon lenses. They are sharp as tacks and were recommended to me by my friend Marilyn Silverstone. She was an accomplished photojournalist for Magnum and could make art out of any situation.They are the NIKKOR 85 mm 1:2 and the Micro-Nikor 55mm 1:28. They are sharp and the shots can be made into beautiful blowups. She used no automatic anything.

[Sharon Knettell]

John, something I neglected to clarify in an earlier post, take a simple photo of a head in natural daylight, have it blown up to the size you are painting, place the subject next to the photo. The photo stays still and you can grab the color from the subject. I call it my training wheels approach. Do many. I still work that way as I am still in training.

[John Zeissig]

Thanks, Sharon

The photo with subject sounds like a great idea. I guess it would work just as well with a B&W print as with a color print since you're grabbing the color from the subject.

What I've been doing is using the photos to locate the pupils of the eyes, the nostrils and the mouth to nostril distance. Usually I have done drawings before I do any photography so I have some idea of what I think I want. If the pupils don't show, or the eyes are averted, I use the eye lines. I measure the distances between these landmarks to give me a formula, a set of ratios, that can be easily scaled to the size of the painting. I put four dots of charcoal on the panel where these features are going to go, and then start drawing. I don't bother to draw in the whole outline of the head and other parts of the subject unless I'm worried about a difficult pose. Then I might do a fairly detailed drawing(s) in charcoal on paper. This painting of Kim was started as a four dot drawing, with very little else. Then I just start painting, the eyes, mouth and under-nose shadow first. As long as I keep the four cardinal points located I can reliably get a likeness. I can modify the features if I want and still get back to where I started. I try to get all the drawing and values worked out in the underpainting, usually raw umber and white. Once I start coloring I try to get the subject live as often as possible to check the skin tones, but I often wind up painting from memory. I guess that's where the surrealism creeps in, huh, Denise?

I think this is similar to an algorithm for face recognition by computer, although I'd been using it for a long time before that thought occured to me. There is an interesting thread on this Forum that I have to get back to (about methods for getting a likeness) with information about artists doing something similar. Until I saw that I thought I was unique in the way I was doing this. I know that nobody asked about how I went about things, but I thought it might be useful to somebody.

I really want to thank everyone for this valuable help. There is a ton of information here that's going to take me days to check out.

[Jeanine Jackson]

Strong, sculptural, and narrative.

The comments have been terrific as well.

The only thing I would add are the blues. The photo source has a lot of blue-violet in the transitions and shadows which appear to be absent in the painting.

[John Zeissig]

Thanks, Jeanine

Yes, there are blues in the photo. This was taken outdoors backed on two sides by a wall of bamboo that does not show, and a blue sky above. They're lousy photos compared to what others have been showing. I didn't transfer the blue to the interior setting. The entire room where the cabinets are is fir wainscoting up to a height of 66" and there are fir beams that form a coffered ceiling. I tried to keep everything warm because I couldn't rationalize any cool reflections from all the warm wood in there. It looks like I overdid it some.

The comments and suggestions have been terrific, haven't they?

I've got another painting of Kim that I'm going to post eventually. Before that, I've got one of a different subject that I started while I was finishing this painting and finished after I'd started the second Kim painting. Confusing? Anyway, the background/narrative elements get more prominent in the ones to follow. I'm also buying Chris Saper's skin tones book!

[Brian McDaniel]

One thing you have to remember with photographs - concerning people's eyes - is that if you are too close when you take the picture, or if they are looking directly into the lens, their eyes will appear crossed. Youve painted them as they appear in the photo, but as a painter, you get the privilege that photographers DON'T get, you get to straighten them out. Just move that right eye (her left) over to the center a bit more. A relatively easy fix.