Portrait: Woman

Well, today was awesome! I attended my first figurative session using oils. The session is held at the studio of my instructor, Karen Winslow. This is the second portrait in oils that I've ever done. Overall, it's not great.... but not bad, either. It doesn't look like the model, but, it definitely looks like a person.

The basic approach that I tried with the figure is the same approach that I am working on with my still life studies. First, I tone the canvas, then I lay in the basic color shapes, then I separate the objects into a light area and a dark area.

The main problem that I had with this was that I didn't keep my brush clean. After the first couple of hours, I realized that the face was extremely dirty looking. So, I removed ALL of the paint off of the face and then did a better job controlling the layering. Still, for the shadow areas, the face still looks dirty. I need to work more on my colors.

Outside of that, the eyes are not drawn properly and the lips/mouth is misshapen. I DO like the way that the hair flows. Rather than drawing individual hairs, I laid down masses of dark and light areas.

The main area for improvement is the same issue that I have with my still life setups: color. I need to start practicing a lot more about mixing the correct color.