Cast Study

Studying apples worked! One of the main reasons for doing the apple study (in January) was to get a feel for creating realistic round objects. This process is needed for a lot of different objects that a person could paint.

Well, it worked. Last night, at my oil painting class, I was able to use two different techniques that I've been working at: ghosting and rounding. The ghosting technique (which my instructor calls it) is a method where you mass in all of the values and then using a soft brush, you smooth everything down. Then, you subsequently add more and more stronger value paints until you get what you want. This help create the roundness because the edges are now more subtle. Also, it's a great way of tying in all of the various paint values together.

So, working on a cast of a head last night, this is what I came up with. I'm pretty proud of it. It doesn't quite look like the model, but it definitely looks like a real face. The cheeks/forehead and neck is rounded appropriately.

Now, let's see if I can repeat this for Saturday's live model.