More Portraits and some Great Paintings

Let's start with the GREAT paintings. Check out these three beauties from Dolly and Susan. 

Dolly Carrick

Susan Frommer

Susan Frommer

Very Proud!  If you want to see these in person they will be at the Murrieta Art Association meeting next month.

Then we continued with portraiture and lessons about how to paint heads. Starting out using venetian red on gessoed paper, we used a photo of perfectly lit model and to practice making the shape of the head and the hair.  Then we gradually moved into adding features using value changes  rather than line. 

When the underpainting was done, some students started adding skin tones. This is Joyce"s

Here's the method.... first decide what color the skin is in light. Some shade of bandaid color from pink to gold to bronze usually mixed with a combination of cad orange, cad red, yellow ochre, venetian red and white. Then you work in the lights considering light lights and darker lights. To move into the shadow plane you neutralize the colors just like in landscape. If the light plane color is reddish, you use a green, if it's bronze you might use a blue or violet. You have to mix it on the palette to find the shadow color. This takes a long time to get right but the painting above is a correct start.

We'll keep taking about heads although if members of the class want to work on other subjects, that's okay too