"Pancho" 11"x14", oil on linen. This one seemed almost to paint itself. Sometimes it goes like that. I windowshaded my way across the underpainting and had very little retouching to do at the end. I had the words of my former instructor, Robert Armetta, ringing in my ear, when he used to tell me, as I painted a detailed area to "paint it's portrait", so that's what I did with the wooden crate. If you're wondering why this photo looks so much better than the rest it's because I've finally found an affordable professional photographer to hire. His name is Devin Cecil-Wishing, he's a third year student at Grand Central Academy, he does all of their artwork photography, and best of all if you're in the New york metro area, he will travel to your studio. Drop me a line if you're interested, and i'll give you his contact info.
These are a couple of small (8"x10") portraits done in a single session, on a white, untoned, canvas board. My procedure is to draw directly on the canvas using raw umber thinned with oms. I'm drawing with a small synthetic bright made by Robert Simmons for acrylic paint. It makes very gestural, softish marks where I can do a light block-in. Once that's resolved I take a small synthetic round and re-draw my lines and terminator lines. I try to keep detail to a minimum at this point and concentrate on getting accurate shadow shapes. Than I wash in the shadow shapes with umber, add some secondary tones, and background. My next step is to identify the overall local flesh color of the model and thinly brush in the shadow tone and middle tone. Once I'm happy with that I begin to refine the larger planes working my way towards smaller forms without losing the big masses. I've been doing a lot of quick painting lately, demos and such, and it's really impacting my approach to painting.
