Portrait in Progress

I haven't posted for a couple of days because I have been enjoying reading other peoples blogs too much, and have been hard at work on a surprise portrait I am doing for my Nan's 80th birthday. It is fairly safe to give a preview here because I am pretty sure she doesn't read this blog. (Not that she wouldn't if she could, she seems fascinated by the net, especially any site that allows photo sharing and would let her keep up with the grand kids comings and goings) So here it is, very unfinished but at least started.

This is a study to see if I can still even remember how to paint a portrait, seriously, it's been that long. So long that I am pretty sure this is my first ever acrylic portrait, previous ones were done in oils and charcoal. (I switched from mostly oils to mostly acrylics about five years ago)

So I just tried to replicate how I work in oils and followed the good advice of one of my teachers. For any painters out there here are a couple of good tips for portrait painting which were passed down to me and have served me very well in everything I've ever painted.

The main thing that has stayed with me is to do the whole thing in black and white first. Get the tones right before you introduce colour. Since I was working from a black and white photo this part was fairly straightforward and worked well.

Then, when you have the composition working tonally, start introducing colour glazes. Just build it up in thin layers. And really look at the skin and notice all the nuances of colour. Not just the flesh tones but the blues and greens too (yes, they are there). This was a bit more of a challenge as I am working just from a photo so I have had to improvise a bit. Which is alright for this project because I wanted to eventually end up with an effect similar to one of those old sepia colored photographs anyway, but a bit more challenging if you are trying to get a very realistic finish. As you can see I am struggling a little bit with getting a nice even flesh tone. But if you just keep building it up thinly you can experiment a bit because you always have the black and white under painting as a guide to keep you tonally on track. Even if you glazed the whole thing blue it would still look ok if the tone is right underneath. (I thank my teachers every day because they saved me years trying to figure this stuff out on my own).

Another thing I found intriguing about this project is that I never really knew Nan when she was this young woman in the photo. In some respects it was like painting a stranger, though I see traces of the grandmother I know now. Usually I prefer to paint people I know, and this exercise is causing my mind to go off on all sorts of tangents wondering about the woman she was then, and what it must have been like to have lived eighty years ago.

So now, after having done this study I am fairly sure that I now want to make a larger portrait, kind of a collage type painting with historical references from the year she was born, some happy birthday text and maybe a smaller, more current photo - a kind of then and now portrait. It also has to have a lemon tree somewhere (!), because she has always wanted one and that will be my main gift to her. The canvas I have chosen now seems woefully too small to accommodate all of this at only 18x24xcm, but at the same time I do not want to do something too large that would dominate any space she puts it in as she lives in a fairly small place. Lots to consider before I resolve this one.

Anyhow, I will post the finished product as soon as I get it done. And did I mention that it has to be fast because her birthday is this month and naturally I left it until the last possible minute to actually start the process of getting the ideas out of my head and onto the canvas? So for now, it's back to the canvas I go.