The Wily Brush

Forgot to post this one, from the week before last. Slow session, focusing on improving my brushwork. I tend to make hair very helmety, and our instructor is really phenomenal at painting in a, well, painterly fashion. So I watched her for a while and tried to capture some of that in the treatment of the hair.

Here I’ve begun to refine the highlights, using the additional elements of local color I finished up last week. The local color of the background showed how relatively dull the highlights on the face were, though the shadows aren’t too bad relative to the black shirt.

Continuing with the variation on the theme for doing more refined work at the early stages, the local color lay-in this time is much more vibrant than the usual dead color we use. Part of this is the desire to get to later painting stage instruction, despite the time limitations of the class.

Model was running late, so only had around an hour and a half of sitting time, at least a half hour of which was mixing paint. So lots left unfinished, because of both less brush time and less mixing time (didn’t have time to whip up mixes for the hair or lips).

As always, we lose a bit of the drawing at this phase. Getting a little better at not completely wrecking it, though!