Tag: portraiture

  • The highlight on her bum, tho

    The highlight on her bum, tho

    This one has been resting for a while, and I pulled her up onto the easel today to have a play. The values in her skin tones were pretty bland, and I wanted to try and experiment with the idea of coloured lighting, because that’s what you’d expect from a place with a pole. This…

  • Three Value Thirst

    Three Value Thirst

    Giving my decrepit shitty brush a rest and pulling out a bright #4 for a value study portrait. I used caput mortuum and some titanium white to create three values on the palette, although I didn’t use much of the white in the end, because I decided to use the sketchbook paper as the lighter…

  • Stumpy Brush

    Stumpy Brush

    One thing that’s not obvious when I post here is the difference in size between one sketch and another. I have a habit of doing these portrait sketches in an A4 sketchbook, but this one is in A3, so twice the size. “Big head, big head, big head” as Chandler would say. My poor little…

  • Dry Media Day

    Dry Media Day

    This looks quite blue to me, but that’s probably because all the curtains were closed to try and keep the temperature down. I don’t know what to say about people who are in denial about climate change. Do they live in a temperature controlled basement? This is Scotland during the school holidays, it’s meant to…

  • Painting Without Seeing Colour

    Painting Without Seeing Colour

    The heat continues to build, and I continue to grunch aboot it. I spent most of the day working in sketchbooks, in the coolest room in the house, but I did get the paint out to play with this portrait for a while. I plopped some colours on a gel plate and then experimented with…

  • More Hot Paint

    More Hot Paint

    It’s even hotter than yesterday, so I should consider knocking the acrylic painting on the head for a while. I decided this after I was already committed to this piece, tho, so I kept going. The boring parcel of yesterday becomes the interesting basis for this exercise. I cut a piece off the cartridge paper…

  • Hot Paint

    Hot Paint

    I did a bit of rearranging today. I have a large box full of canvases in various sizes, but I never use them because the box had a wooded board on top that became a kind of shelf for other things. So I’ve shuffled things around a bit, and maybe I will start using more…

  • Finished a Sketchbook

    Finished a Sketchbook

    I finished a sketchbook today. I’m not sure how many pages it has, but it’s now full of graphite portrait drawings and sketches done in twenty minutes or less. The top right is the first page, and the centre bottom is the last page, which I sketched today, and the others are some of my…

  • Soft Pastel Everywhere

    Soft Pastel Everywhere

    I am having a lot of fun with this one, not least because whatever perimenopause shite is going on with my hip/knee combo seems to be easing, and I’ve been able to stand for longer periods of time. Yay. This is two more sessions from the last time I posted. The first session involved a…

  • Chunks and Smears

    Chunks and Smears

    One of yesterday’s drawings was hilariously bad, but a good smear of gesso over everything but the head made a fresh layer for another go today. I used one of my XL charcoal chunks for some messy, chonky mark-making, and then sprayed it all with water. I can never remember which XL charcoal chunks are…

  • Sketch and Go

    Sketch and Go

    We returned home today, and I’m glad I painted this first thing before we left, because I’m about as flat-out as she is. Til the morn, Suzanne 497/500

  • Triptych

    Triptych

    I wasn’t thinking about this figure sketch in context with yesterday’s sketch on the left, but they make a nice spread together, so that’s a bonus. My singular favourite shitty brush and I are perhaps coming to the end of this journey, as the bristles are now about half the original length. Poo. For my…