Nancy's Cheek

I completely repainted the chin and mouth area and a bit more today. This time I matched my color string to the poster study by keeping right next to my larger canvas and trying out the mixtures directly on the poster. It's a little hard to tell because todays pic photoshopped a little dark but the values are keyed to match. I had a little bit of a revelation in cast painting class yesterday. Up until recently I've always painted with fairly large bristle filberts, but I decided to start using smaller rounds to kind of get myself ready for cast painting the GCA way. I had the idea all wrong in my head. I was painting with the tip of the brush trying to pile micro-form on top of micro-form to eventually add up to the larger forms. My instructor saw what I was doing on my cast so he came over and demonstrated on a little section of my painting. He used the heel of the brush to lay on paint stroke next to stroke, without too much fussing around, using the tip only when needed to lay in a subtle tone between tones. That's pretty much the way I painted with bristles so once I got the idea my cast painting just kind of took off. So I decided to re-work the portrait along the same lines and it's making a lot more sense to me now. With the direct method, form has to come first, than detail if needed. I knew this, but in my zeal to learn a new method I completely "duhhed" out on it. Well, that's why I'm there, to learn.