Two weeks ago my sister Ceci traveled up from Louisiana to take a couple of art workshops with me. The first was a three morning (!) portrait painting workshop with Maud Taber-Thomas of the Yellow Barn. Ahead of time I was very skeptical that we’d be able to learn much about portrait painting in three half-days — especially in view of the four months it had taken me to do the one of Dad.
Maud used a very clever curriculum to crack that nut. Morning One: Draw a charcoal or pencil sketch of the model. Here’s our excellent model.
And my initial sketch.
Morning Two: Apply that sketch to our canvas and paint a monochromatic value study (in burnt sienna oil paint, in our case) over the sketch, making any drawing adjustments we thought necessary.
Morning Three: Apply more colors over the value study, using an extremely limited palette of white, yellow ochre, venetian red, and ultramarine blue. That gave us three primary colors (of sorts), and the possibility of mixing the secondaries, green, orange & purple (of sorts). Here’s how mine stood at the end of the third morning.
And here’s how it looked after a bit of tinkering back at home. I tried to soften the jaw line; make her eyes and mouth more pleasant, as our lovely model’s had been; and re-contour the edge of her face on the left side. I’m encouraging sister Ceci to post hers too! Hers were lovely – much more painterly than mine.
