Category: Portrait Painting

  • Feet Dangling

    Feet Dangling

    Starting the day with in-person art supplies shopping is better than coffee. Starting the day with excellent bargains on good quality sketchbooks, and half-price canvases is better than, well, coffee with cream. I also bought some thick foam for making stamps, and a bottle of clear gesso. I didn’t bring my clear gesso, but I…

  • Hands and Hands

    Hands and Hands

    Painting at a dining table instead of my studio, so embracing the limitations. I’ve left the hands for tomorrow, or another day, because daylight runs out this far north. Til the morn, Suzanne 637/700

  • Crouching

    Crouching

    I have been distracted today, but I got this far with this pose and idea. There’s a lot more to do, but the basic shapes are there. This is on 300gsm hot press paper, not my sketchbook, so the paint is doing different things. Til the morn, Suzanne 636/700

  • Don’t Move

    Don’t Move

    I’m completely smitten with my pan pastels, and I don’t think I have even scratched the surface of their versatility. Here I’m using them over acrylic, and I’m loving how this turned out, especially given it went through a particularly “ugly stage”. Someone was waxing unlyrical about drawing from reference photos recently, and the problem…

  • Pan Pastels Portrait Set

    Pan Pastels Portrait Set

    I had quite a productive day today and worked on several things, but the highlight of the day was the arrival of a set of pan pastels. I don’t usually buy sets of things, but the offer price was too good to pass up, and the only colour I already had was the white, so…

  • Grasp

    Grasp

    This is the first time I have used tube black in this sketchbook, having been experimenting with chromatic blacks as a side-shoot of this project. It definitely gives a different feel to a piece. I threw some yellow on the page too, because I never use yellow in a very yellow way. I didn’t like…

  • Honing Ms Drips

    Honing Ms Drips

    There was a lot of playing in sketchbooks today, and lots of ideas came out of that, and there will hopefully be further play and exploration going on there. I realised that I had been avoiding this canvas for some reason, no idea why, so I put it up on the easel and pushed and…

  • Twisting Twirls

    Twisting Twirls

    Experimenting with yesterday’s happy accident, and thinking I’m going to keep experimenting with this process. I predict an art supplies purchase coming up, as I only have two colours plus black and white of these pan pastels. I don’t even have a turquoise one. Shocking. Til the morn, Suzanne 630/700

  • Clear Gesso Rescue

    Clear Gesso Rescue

    I started the day doing some fun sketchbook practise abstracting shapes from some landscape photos. This is not my usual practise, and it was a lot of fun. Once I was done there was some leftover paint, so I used it up in my A3 sketchbook to start a background. I was especially taken with…

  • Cadmium Orange Fun

    Cadmium Orange Fun

    Instead of red, I tried a ground using cadmium orange as the starting place for this portrait. I started off with the highlights instead of sketching, and I quite liked the ghostly effect, so I took a snap. I kept going, and ended up here… I might go again with this one, as it’s such…

  • Sole Perspective

    Sole Perspective

    This sketchbook started out as a project on practising painting hands, and evolved into hands and feet, and figures with either hands, feet, or both. I was flipping through it today, and it’s so much more than that, because there’s also colour explorations, materials explorations, technique explorations, value, shape, proportions and perspective. I’m noting that…

  • Pan Pastels Mixed Media Figure

    Pan Pastels Mixed Media Figure

    I have watched a few demonstrations using pan pastels, and I’ve followed a couple of classes, and never really found a way with the medium that feels natural to me. I do really like using them, even though I have this weird conflict with dry mediums because I can’t be arsed with the whole sealing…