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.