the atelier method A COMPLETE PORTRAIT
This 10-step demonstration shows the various stages of a two-hour portrait painting session at Lavender Hill Studios. If you are trying this at home, the key is to avoid attempting to add details to the painting too early in the process; if the dark, middle and light masses are in the right place, the likeness will come. And likewise, no amount of detail will produce a likeness later on if the main masses are in the wrong place at the start.
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The fi rst thing to do is cover up the white of the canvas. It’s not essential but I like to scrub on a wash of paint mixed with turps
as it evaporates, so the paint dries quickly – you can get some quite interesting effects with this layer if you play around. In terms of colour, you could use browns, reds, blues, blacks; any possible transparent colours that would allow the white of the canvas to come through. However, I strongly suggest you don’t use white at all; even a small
amount mixed with other colours will mix into everything you paint thereafter, preventing you from getting truly dark shadows later on.
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Start by placing the head on the canvas and deciding how large you want to make it – larger than, equal to, or smaller than
life-size? To decide on this, I usually do a loose sketch in a couple of minutes fi rst, not much more than an oval with hair, a neck and a hint of shoulders. Next map out the various guidelines detailed in the workshop above. It is important to get the horizontals of the eyebrow line and the bottoms of the eyes, nose and mouth all more or less parallel as they would appear in life; if the head is tilted at all, those lines should all be slightly off the horizontal.
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3 4
You may remember in the chiaroscuro workshop that we begun by massing in the darker areas with charcoal – here you should
do the same, applying thin layers of your darkest colours so you can work over them later. Although the detail of the hair does not matter much at this stage, it is useful to block it in as it helps to outline the head and the neck. I also apply the two main highlighted areas – the forehead and the shoulder – as they are striking and give me a better idea of the painting’s tonal range.
Working from the bottom line of the chin upward, begin to mass in the skin tones of the chin and cheek. I picked out the angle of
the nose, just marking it with a bit of red coming down the side. I also painted in a suggestion of the mouth, with a bit of red, black and a touch of white. Don’t be frightened of really just whacking the paint on the canvas at this stage to develop a sense of the main areas of colour and tone.
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2 68 Artists & Illustrators
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