Journal of My Oil Painting Techniques

I have not posted on my oil painting techniques blog for a while.  i feel very guilty for not having painted for so long. I usually like to paint the portraits and figures from life, so when I don’t have a live model I just don’t paint at all, which is not a good thing, as I believe that a painter should be a painter in general, not just a portrait or a figure painter. Also my skills drop when I do not practice everyday.

But thanks to Brittney, I finally got to get back to painting today. I have not seen her for a while after our first session because she have been very busy and also been sick with a flu. It was really great to see her again. I  cant thank my models enough for making the time to come in, despite their busy schedules.

So this was our second sitting. If you would like to read about this painting from the start, go to the 5/30, 2009 post  of this blog, which is about our first sitting.

Brittney had been hanging out at the beach so her skin tone changed somewhat, darker in general and also reds from the sunburn on her front torso areas. It kind of became a challenge to imagine the skin color without the sunburn.

I worked a lot on the face today, just filling in the blank spots, blending, polishing, and adding details. I also tried to cover up the canvas with paint as much as I can with the time left over after working mostly on the face of our 3 hour session.

I still tried to stay with the larger paint brushes as much as I could, to avoid rendering in too much detail. But I did use a very tiny brush to touch up some detailed areas in the face, especially the eye region. I also did a lot of altering and correcting things throughout the figure, such as sizing down the feet a bit. I think it is not wise to just feel like you have to be stuck with the original lay-in. I prefer to change and alter things as I go, even though at times it can be quite risky.

I found that it is important to paint as if you are sculpting. Making the brushstrokes define the roundness of the form, instead of relying too much on the careful outline that I have established from the start. Sometimes it becomes easy to think as if you are just filling the outlines in with colors, and this  definitely does not produce a convincing rendering of the human form, and is not a good practice of oil painting techniques.

When I come to the point where I have to define the outline of the figure, I never do it by trying to fill it up till it touches the outline, but I would deliberately paint over the outline. For example, I would paint the outside part of the arm slightly larger than it is, going past the outline drawn, then I would cut, chisel it off with the background paint. I find that this kind of method gives very 3-d sculptural quality, which is a very good way of classical oil painting techniques.

I couldn’t focus too well today actually, because I was feeling kind of tired from lack of sleep last night. Britt and I talked the whole time during the session to keep me awake. I am just glad that I didn’t  mess up on the painting. I don’t think I can talk anymore of the oil painting techniques involved during today’s session because there wasn’t much done to it then basically working more on the face and trying to cover up the canvas.

I have a lot more to go with this piece , and I hope Brittney will be back again soon.

I started on this nude painting of Meg today. She was very kind to have sat for me for the long 4 hour session and I think she may come back for another session tomorrow.

Meg had a very light skin tone which reflected a lot of surrounding colors which produced very soft but colorful skin tones. She reminded me of the models in the old masters’ paintings where the females had very light skins back then.

Her eye regions were very dark due to her very long black eyelashes and maybe some make-ups and it really added great contrast against her very light skin tone. The eyes really stood out.

I started this nude painting by trasferring a preliminary drawing I did on the canvas. Then when the outlines were accurately traced, I began throwing on the colors with thick oil paints. For her skin tone, I have used the alizarin crimson, cadmium red, yellow achre, hint of cereulean blue, hint of viridian, and lots of titanium white. For the shadow areas of the skin, I used he complimentary colors of the ones I have just mentioned, combined with some ultramarine blue and burnt umber.

After i have worked on the figure and the head for some time, I started to add some background tones to have the figure pop out more. I intensely observed the color contrasts of the figure against the background and found that it is basically the red (background) against its complimentary green (figure) that I needed to look for. The figure definitely doesn’t necessarily look green but I knew that I should keep that in mind to contrast it with the red background.

I also exaggerated on the dark edges separating the figure and the red sofa to make the figure really come forward. Then I spent my last 30 minutes or so just working on the portrait, refining and tightening things up.

Im looking forward to working more on this nude painting tomorrow.