Portraits in Oils - Week 2 - Tuesday

Self - portrait

Our workshop Martinho Corriea gave a demo on creating a portrait. He is so skilled in his craft, he makes it look easy.

I didn't have a color copy so I printed out a black and white reference on my home computer. I traced out my image onto tracing paper by taping it up on the big windows at the Calgary School of Art.

 I rubbed down the back of the tracing paper with vine charcoal, lined it up the way I liked the composition to appear on the canvas and traced back over top of my line to press the charcoal thru the paper and onto the ground.

The canvas that was prepared last week with Lead white and textured with a super sponge was wet sanded and given a rub of burnt umber before beginning. I then inked in traced sketch with thinned down umber.

I dead coloured my shadows first, the half tone for the skin and threw down come color for the shirt area.

 I added a background made up of yellow ochre, black and white and let it dry overnight while going back and forth between the other portrait of the girl I started (yesterday's post entry).