The portrait of the dancer and violinist below took a few months and caused a minor crisis in our home. My family endured numerous dinners of frozen pizza, a house in shambles, and clean clothing shortage. I'm proud to say they managed to persevere through these first world problems and even rose to the occasion! As I got closer to my deadline, summer break began and I was painting 10 or 12 hours a day. "The Oldest" was so helpful, making lunches for her siblings and for me. That way, I could just stop painting for 5 minutes to shovel the food in. (Asking her to feed the lunch to me while I painted seemed a bit extreme.) After months of "hardship", the painting was finally finished and everyone lived happily ever after. That is, until I take on my next portrait!
For our nutritional health and mental well-being, I decided to try a new technique to portrait painting.
I usually start by painting a full underpainting, complete with all the details. As you can see below, it just looks like a sepia version of my finished product, even including the violinist's bracelet and the sequins on the dancer's dress. Color is then added, transparent in some places and opaque in others. Finally, I touch on the little details again and I'm finished!
This time, I decided to entirely forgo the underpainting and use the same techniques that I showed in a prior post when painting a pear . The reference photo of "Peanut" is from a recent family vacation to Colorado, which I cropped to just show her head and shoulders. I thought this would make a good portrait, because the viewer is left to interpret her expression. Is she thoughtful? sad? concerned? suspicious? In reality, I think she was just tired because we were hiking on the Boulder Flatirons.
(Just a quick word of advice for those thinking of hiking the Flatirons - don't send all the snacks and water with the slow group that only plan to go halfway up! Those hiking all the way to the top get very thirsty and hungry. And I know from personal experience, because that's what the rest of the family texted me after "Peanut" and I sent them photos of us eating ice cream while waiting for them to finish their hike.)
Okay, back to painting... Below is the reference photo with the first 3 steps: 1. The Basic Shape (top right), 2. Draw the Shadow Areas (bottom left) and 3. Paint the Shadow Areas (bottom right). The canvas is rectangular, but it's cropped here to a square, so that's why she looks so high on the canvas.
Next, I moved on with 4. The Background (top left) and 5. The Light Areas (top right). On a still life, I would now add the reflective light; however, I didn't really see any obvious reflected light so I decided to skip this step and moved on to 6. The Midrange (bottom left). Next, I would add the cast shadow (like the shadow under her nose and lip), but I had already painted those in step 3 so I moved on. The "highlights" would be next, but many highlights, such as in her eyes, couldn't be painted until after the details, so I combined the highlights step and the details step into 7. Details (bottom right).
Did I finish in a day? Not quite. I still need to do some work on her hand and a little bit of fine-tuning. Did we eat take-out? Sorry to say that we did. Did the house look like it had been ransacked? Most definitely! But it was only for one day, so that's not too bad, right?
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