Color Portrait from Black & White Photo

[Ilaria Rosselli Del Turco]

Dear Lara,
you are very sweet: thank you, being called Miss sends a shiver along my spine!
I do not know about Marvin,whom I haven't had the pleasure to meet or to interact with on these pages, but I definetely prefer to be called Ilaria.
Hope your work is proceding well
I.

[Marvin Mattelson]

I'll go with Marvin. When I hear Mr. Mattelson I immediately think someone's calling my father and I'm in trouble again, something that would never happen here!

I'm glad we were able to help you out.

[Allan Rahbek]

Marvin,
I am amazed. Do you actually use around 40 brushes? One for every premixed color +++.
I have read earlier about your strings of gray, yellow and red and find it useful to premix them.

I have made a gray scale of 10 steps and tubed them, am also planning on tubing yellow and reds.

But I have a hard time figuring out how much you have to mix on the palette.
When you gray down the different colors you must end up with more dots than there is space on the palette, or what? Could you show us a photo of your palette when working, please ??

I normally end up with 4-5 different areas of color that I adjust with small amounts of white or whatever needed.

Allan

[Marvin Mattelson]

I generally employ a separate brush for every value of each color I'm painting. When I'm painting flesh for example there are many hue and intensity shifts within each value. I would use one brush for each flesh value using a rag, not thinner, to wipe off any excess paint.

If I needed to paint a larger or smaller area of the same color I'd switch to a new brush. If I were to paint something that was a different color, say blue, I would use a new brush.

At the end of the day, if I'm laying color onto a new painting, I could use thirty brushes, give or take, to cover the variety of colors and values of each. If I'm working on a specific area later in the development of the painting I could use just five or six. I never use a brush to paint two different values of the same color or two different colors of the same value.

I have nine values of grey and each of my color strings, equally stepped, between black and white paint. I mix among the two red strings, the one yellow string and the gray string at each value. Again this is a gross simplification.

I'll post a picture of my palette the next time I paint flesh.

[Valerie Warner]

Hi All,

I just ran across this thread and found it interesting. I have completed a workshop with Marvin and have found his palette to be a life saver. Yes, we use alot of brushes. One for every size/value/chroma mixture. We do NOT use any solvents in our paintings so there is no constant rinsing of brushes when I change colors in turps that fume into my world. I keep the brush for next use in a tiered brush holder with value numbers on it to keep me organized. It's like playing a piano when I'm in a flow. Right now I'm painting a black Labrador dog. I've mixed up the values of B&W across my palette, with ultra marine blue, perm aliz, raw umber, and yellow ochre on the side to change the chroma of my grays to match what I see in my reference. WOW it's clean & easy. I'll post my palette layout when I get it mixed today if you'd like.