As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve started to use free reference images from Pixabay. My focus this week was on the female face and I had a little fun with some bright blue brush strokes.
This week I also put more time into each individual painting and didn’t pressure myself to finish a painting each day. These paintings took several hours spread out over a couple of days, which is longer than I usually take on a painting this size. I’m also choosing good references with strong contrast to help me see the structure of the face.
I download a bunch of individual eyes and mouths from Pixabay, but I don’t know if I’m all that interested in doing those types of individual studies. I might anyway just for the sake of practice though. The defined structures of the eyes, nose, and mouth feel pretty straightforward to paint whereas I’m struggling more with the subtleties of the cheek, chin, and jaw areas.
This weeks paintings also seem to mark a breakthrough in mixing skin tones. I was really struggling with mixing. To get skin tones I’m mainly mixing Yellow Ochre, Pyrrol Red (or maybe Naphthol Red I mixed them up and can’t remember which is on my palette), and Zinc White. The darker shadow areas contain Dioxazine Purple, Burnt Umber and a touch of Pyrrol Red.
The blue in each painting is a mix of Phthalo Blue and Prussian Blue. After the subtle, not too vibrant shades in the face, it’s really satisfying to go in with that ultra bold color.
See you all with new paintings next week. 🙂