Portrait of Zoe: Final stages July 30, 2010

I'm tempted to just stop at this stage but there are a few things more I can do in about an hour or so that would make this better so I'll wait and finish this tomorrow. I'm at the stage where everything I do is more and more harder to notice because the changes are getting smaller and smaller. Eventually one has to weight the benefits of continuing on verses the benefits of stopping.

Portrait of Zoe : Final Underpainting

This morning I glazed the piece by adding red over the jacket and reddish purple over the hair. This had the effect of bringing the painting together more. This reddish tone will show through after I start painting the final details and continue to be a unifying force. I had planned to start that process today but the darned glazing didn't dry. I had to put it out in the sun for hours and tonight its sitting under a fan. Hopefully tomorrow it will be dry enough that I can paint over it without the glazing working up into the new paint. Total time for this phase was 10 minutes of painting and about 15 hrs of watching the paint dry.

Portrait of Zoe : stage 6 underpainting

Today's version of the painting is more contrasty than yesterday's. This is because I've prepared the underpainting for the final stages of glazings. If one puts a layer of transparent color onto a surface, one always darkens and reduces the contrast of that part of the painting. Today I added bright highlights to the parts of the red jacket I want to pop out more after I glaze again. I also blocked in the hair with highlights that are lighter in value than her real hair is. This will give me some latitude so I can glaze the hair area more than once to find the best color combination that works. I'm trying to deal with the hair as a sculptural mass that has form and waves. Later after I have glazed the hair and knocked down the values, I can add more highlights or shadows and even individual hairs if I need to.

Portrait of Zoe (Hours 4 & 5)

I've been posting hourly progress pictures of a painting I'm doing of my daughter. Here is yesterday's and today's facebook posting. I post lots of notes at my facebook page.

Portrait of Zoe

For the past three days I've been posting images depicting a small 5x7" oil portrait I'm doing of my daughter, Zoe for my step by step album on facebook. Each image represents about an hour's worth of work. I may end up spending 8 hrs. on this sketch. I'm working with real paints again. And my goal eventually is to get fast enough and accomplished enough that I can do at least one of these 5x7's every day. I'm just not fast enough to do that yet so I've been posting in stages. These three images were my sketch of the day July 23rd, 24th & 25th, 2010 on Facebook. I'm using water mixable oil paints. I really love them because they have no odor and are wonderfully easy to clean up and clean the brushes. Only complaint I have is that they seem to be more like alkyds in the way they handle. They are not quite the same as fine oil paints in the way they cover and blend and mix. But I'm slowly getting the hang of it.

Caricature of "MIA" ( Maya Arulpragasam )

This is a sketch I did today for my One Painting or Drawing per Day albums on Facebook. I'm also doing it to submit in the Caricaturama Showdown contest group on Facebook. It took about an hour and I used an old wacom tablet and photoshop 7.

Giant Japanese Salamander Reading (Study After Fragonard)

Today I visited Henry Mayo's facebook pages and I was browsing his great monster concept art, when it suddenly occured to me that I still needed to finish the study after Fragonard's "The Reader". This is what I usually lable a "brain phart". Just a quick rendered doodle. The sketch took me about 20 minutes and I used an old Wacom Bamboo digital tablet and photoshop 7.