Morgan Crawl

"Well we gotta new dance and it goes like this,

bop-shoo-bop it's the portrait painting twist".

I'm slowly crawling my way up Morgan's face. In the last three hour session I started at the bottom of the chin because I wanted to slowly roll up to the strong light on the cheek bones. I'm putting a little bit of color touches here and there, but even though I'm using a flesh palette I'm trying to keep it fairly mono chromatic. I'm avoiding, at least at this stage, chromatic changes in the flesh color because I'm concentrating on rendering the light on the subtle forms. It's a real challenge to not have the face look too sculptural or mask like. Once the basic planar structure is noted I have to look for the subtle weaving of related forms, "pathways of light" as Tony Ryder would say. The other problem is the primitive nature of the lighting setup. Because we're working in a space that also doubles as a gallery, there are rows of flourescent lights that can't be turned off. I had to light the model with a 150 watt outdoor spotlight just to cut through the ambient light. That being said, I'm pretty much conceptualizing the forms as per my cast painting training so I'm not strictly painting the light as it is. The next one I'm going to arrange in my studio with one or two other artists and definitely have much better lighting.