Millington Mural Day 3

Day three I walk in to see my work. I'm always telling my students to put their artwork somewhere so that it will be the first thing they see in the morning. With a fresh perspective on seeing it, any mistakes or things that they want or need to change will "pop out" at them. It's a great way to either pat yourself on the back for a job well done or see immediately what needs more work. As I walked into the room to see this mural I was patting myself on the back. It actually came out way better than I imagined and it got done within my schedule. Meetings could resume in this room without any delays. If you still can't tell how big this piece is by this photo of me standing at the corner, here's Jule photographing the piece with the room tables set up.

All I had left to do was to varnish the mural. I was able to put three coats of acrylic varnish over it on the last day. It took a full day to varnish it but I taught classes as I waited for each coat to dry. I suggested to the manager of the center that they discourage the taping of posters or excessive touching of the piece for a few months, at least. But my best suggestion is that if they or you have a large mural that was expressly created by an artist or that you desire to keep for any extended period of time, an investment in a plexiglass cover would keep your piece beautiful for years to come.

Millington Mural Day 2

Day two began as early as I could get into the building. With google map in hand I painted the major highways into town and blocked in light brown fields. The city buildings on the map are hundreds of little squares. Since this will be the background for the mural, that much detail was not needed. I found that a good square brush and a mixture of white and greys painted in horizontal and vertical strokes created enough definition. After the buildings were put in place I was able to use a mixture of greens to paint fields and sponge larger masses of trees.

After a break I began in the upper right hand corner blocking in the planes. I painted shadows on the planes just as I saw them on my reference photos so there was actually no complicated thinking of which way a cast shadow would go or where the sun light was coming from. I found myself identifying, instead, weird shapes and triangles darks and lights on the planes bodies.

When it came to detailed signage I used painters tape to block off straight edges. Many of the sign areas had to be double coated but with time of the essence I found that I could easily paint two to three coats in between working on sketching or painting other parts instead of just "waiting for paint to dry".

Jane's Perspective is all about the tricks and techniques of painting that create realism without all the hassle. For example, the brick pillars that held the "Welcome to Millington" sign needed shadows on one side. I painted (as you can see from the top of the pillar) one side a darker grey than the other. Then I painted the bricks using a square brush that was the exact width of the bricks I wanted to create AND I painted each brick the same color. Because the "morter" was darker on one side, it makes it look like the bricks were a darker color also.

To sketch everything in place, I used while chalk. If you look carefully you can see the lines of the chalk around the building painted in the lower right hand corner of the mural. Once painted, any excess chalk was simply wiped away with a rag or a slightly dampened paper towel.

About 2:00 in the afternoon, I figured how many more "sites" or signs that I had left to paint, figured how long I could physically work without getting too tired, and divided up the time left so that I could push myself yet take enough breaks so the work would continue to be good. Setting these goals helped because by 6:00 I was ahead of myself, took a supper break, and came back to fine tune the piece. With a three day goal in mind I was able to allow the mural to dry overnight before coming back to varnish it.

A Mural in Three Days - Day 1

I teach painting classes at the Baker Community Center in Millington, Tennessee. At the end of the hall is a room with a large wall mural. As you can tell from this picture, the mural had a lot of damage to it (not the stuff in the lower right hand corner but the pieces of mural that were coming off the wall). The manager at the center asked me if I could do a mural in it's place. "Sure" says I. After getting some photos of the area I make a plan to paint an arial view of Millington on the wall with different outstanding locations and attractions painted in a collage effect over the map. "Good plan" says I and with paint in hand I proceed to paint the background over the present mural only to find that the "mural" is actually just a wall papered photo. As the wet paint touches the paper, the "mural" crinkles and the paper proceeds to come off the wall. There is nothing to do but strip the wallpaper off the entire surface of the wall and then begin my painting. "Easy enough" says I only to find that after one hour, the lower right hand corner is all I've been able to scrape off. In a panic (since I have allowed myself only three days to create this masterpiece) I call one of my art students who lives close by. Jule, the self professed queen of "Get it done now" comes to my rescue with wallpaper remover and within about three or four hours we get the whole thing removed. Here's Jule scraping away at it. She and I are both about the same height so our shortness was a definate issue in the difficulty of the wallpaper removal.

In an attempt to keep as close to my three day schedule as possible, I stay later than I planned at the community center and base coat the wall. This was done with regular house paint and since I didn't have enough of one color I had to mix in a second color at the bottom but I think it did just fine since I knew the whole thing would be covered up later. The graduation of color kind of helped in the creation of a more attractive background, too. It kinda made for a neat abstract or is that just Jane's Perspective?

My plan had been to actually finish the background and the arial map. But considering it took half the day just to get the mural off the wall, I'm satisfied with getting the base coat finished. Plus, I was pretty tired by this time. Painting a mural as big as this one which was 10' X 16' is hard enough. Scraping wallpaper off the area first added to my fatigue. I was looking for a BC powder and a good night's sleep before I began day 2.

Step 4

Now you are all set to just paint things as you see them in the photo or as you imagine them to be realistically. Here's the jacket and the guitar painted as I see them to be. Notice, however that as I paint if some of the underpainted color peaks through, I make a conscious decision to let it stay. I could choose to paint over the underpainting color until it goes away, but heck, what fun would that be. I'm loving the unexpected colors that peak through so I'm leaving them.

Here I've painted the star yellow and white but as I apply my paint I let thick portions stay (without smoothing them out) to add even more texture and I let the purple underpainting show through on parts. Notice how I've also thrown caution to the wind when it comes to creating straight lines to the star. It's the excitement I'm trying to capture, not the exact realism of a perfectly straight symmetrical star. Now I begin to paint the background and you can see that the background (particularly around the face) is my backup to correcting shapes and errors that I want to refine. I can paint closer in on the forehead and cheek or leave some of the underpainting show to round out part of the chin. Don't just blindly paint the background in, use it to refine your painting.

As you paint the background you are not painting an object but you are painting the negative space or the space around the object.

Notice the drum set portion in this picture painted in it's realistic colors. The stands are painted but they are not very refined. Just a kind of sloppy line at this point.

As I paint the negative space (the space around the drum stands) or the background I begin to create the shape of the drum stands by NOT painting the drumstands.

Here's a wider view so you can focus on the objects I am creating by painting the negative space which in this case is also the floor of the stage.

Closer up on the right under the bass you can see the negative space painting creates the bass stand.

So now Elvis is coming to life. I add more details and then restrain myself in these impressionistic works from going "too far". With a painting like this you step back a lot to see what the piece looks like from a distance. When you get just to the point of recognition in the face or the objects you STOP.

As a result you don't have just a pretty painting of an image but you creat in your painting an excitement and emotion of the image. You have captured the spot light of the stage, the excitement of the performance and the performer - all in the unexpected colors of the painting. You can almost hear the music in the vibrations of the colors and the brushstrokes. I love to paint this way. I hope you enjoyed taking the step by step journey with me.

Step 3

This entire blog looks like it's gonna be no more than 4 or 5 steps. That makes it sound easy and I hope you find it that way but if not never fear, just take it slowly. If you were to watch me demo this process you might see my hand and brush "fly" across the canvas but that's just the way I paint. There's no need for you to try to go that fast. I've been painting this way for over 20 years.

By the way if you are up to date on reading this blog, August 20, 2011 I'll be at the Wolf Chase Galleria in Memphis, Tennessee demonstrating this technique on a larger than life painting of Marilyn Monroe. I'll not only be using this process but some larger than usual paint brushes. There will be a whole lotta paint mess in the process. You'll undoubtedly see my hands work faster than you might as you first experience this process but I think you'll enjoy watching. If you can't get by to watch, here's more on the process.

You have already painted the background in opposite colors or some strange color that you selected. Now you are going to begin to paint the painting "for real". That means you will paint the real colors of each object ONLY don't get all caught up in the realistic aspect of this painting. It's all about the excitement of the colors. So as you create a brush stroke and an opposite color peaks through, take a moment to look at it and think about leaving it exposed.

For example, in this picture I have painted the guitar in yellow ochres and browns. My underpainted color was a dark blue and I was able to let it peak through on the shadow parts of the guitar. Step by step, you can see that I've painted the shadow on the pants in a dark brown. Then I paint the dark blue/purple paints with their highlights. Notice how some of the yellow peaks through on the leg on the left. Not much is peaking through here however so you see that you can make a choice to leave lots of "peak thrus" or just a little "peak thrus" or no "peak thrus" at all. I have students who start this process and completely cover the strange colored underpaintings. Jane's Perpsective is if you like it, leave it. If you don't like it paint over it.

Things get really strange on the face. If you followed my blog about realistic portraits you'll see that I follow the same steps/process here only I just don't go in for all that detail. Just like in the realistic portrait, I start with the shadows. Here I've painted the shadows in dark brown over the blue face.

Next, just like in the realistic portrait, I paint the highlights that I see on the face.

Then I fill in the middle areas with the flesh tone of the face. If I work really fast some of the colors blend together right on the canvas. If they don't I get a block of color. If I like it I leave it. If I don't I continue to paint over it until I get a resemblance - not a perfect likeness - but a resemblance. After all this is an "impression" of the person.

You can see I also worked on the hands so that I wouldn't have to worry about mixing the exact skin color again. This can really be a problem in acrylics unless you have a stay wet palette or are good at matching colors.

This type of painting takes a different mindset and you have to throw a lot of caution to the wind. I'll show you what I mean with a lesson in negative space in my next blog.

Step 2

I'm putting my titles on this series of blogs as "steps" cause I was noticing that if you jump into the blog just anywhere, you are liable to be in the middle of something and not know where you are. Following the steps or taking up a step where you left off will probably make more sense. Especially today cause the painting step you are going to see here is going to really "shake you up" and taken out of sequence, it could be rather confusing.

We finished the sketch yesterday so today I want to start the underpainting. But first here's a little tale I'm telling on myself.

I actually went through 7 years of college painting courses (4 undergraduate and 3 years more to get my Masters) and though I learned a lot, none of my teachers taught me UNDERPAINTING. As a result, one of the most frustrating things to me (and now a pet peeve of mine) was to paint a painting and have raw canvas show through. Especially as I painted more impressionistically, there were always brush strokes that didn't completely cover the canvas or had a dry brush effect and I was literally trying to fill in the "gaps" after the painting was completed. Years later I was working in the casinos of all places when a fellow blackjack dealer showed me some of her artwork and started talking about what she had done in the underpainting. Underpainting? It was the first time I had ever heard the word and as she explained its' simplicity I seriously felt like a fool. Then I felt kinda gypped that no one ever taught me anything about it for my artwork. I can't imagine how much further I would have been in the success of my pieces if I had been using underpaintings for the past 20 years. Don't let that happen to you. Go to all the seminars, talk to all your artist friends, read all the how-to books, ask questions, look at artwork up close and take all the classes you can until you find your artistic style and then still keep your mind open to more.

OK, lecture over. We're going to start our underpainting. Simply stated, an underpainting is a painting you put down first (in a wash or opaque style - it does't matter, you are going to paint over it later anyway). It's a painting UNDER the final painting. The most logical underpainting is a wash of the colors that you will choose to use later. Putting down this "same" color underpainting helps you see what the painting will eventually look like, covers all of the canvas with color (so there won't be any pesky white canvas peeking through like an unfinished paint by number set ) and gives you a chance to change any of the colors when you paint over the underpainting. How convenient! How brilliant! How "why didn't I see that earlier" neat!

Only I have one tee-niney little change to that definition of an underpainting that I am going to make on THIS painting. I mean, there are no rules in painting so I'm going to paint the opposite colors as an underpainting. Why? Because I can AND because I am really looking for some excitement in the colors of this piece so why not?

To paint the opposite colors I have to kinda think backwards. If you choose to do this it actually helps to get out a basic color wheel to keep you mind on track. And think SIMPLY. Don't get all complicated. Look at the picture and say, "OK, purple background, white shirt, brown instrument, peach skin color, blue pants, etc etc". Don't get all hung up on the exact shade or variations in shadows. Just like a coloring book, name the colors of the parts of the picture. BUT when you get ready to paint - paint a wash of the opposite colors like this: In this part of the painting the jacket is going to be blue and the opposite color of blue is orange so I paint the jacket orange. His face is going to be peach which is like orange and the opposite of orange is blue so his face gets painted blue. The instrument is brown which is kinda hard to figure but put in it's simplest form, brown is warm like a dark orange so the opposite of orange is blue. It's not rocket science so don't get hung up, just paint. As long as you paint an object in an unexpected color, you're good. And don't panic (see next picture)

OK, I told you not to panic. Sure that blue face and hands on my American icon looks strange but bear with me. I mean I could have thought of the head and hands as pink (a shade of red) and painted them in green. Doesn't matter, it's my painting and I can paint it like I like (what an attitude).

Here's what all of the figures in the painting look like painted in opposite colors. The figure's dark purple/blue pants are now yellow, the yellow drum set is now purple, the white jacket (again I figure the closest to white is light blue so I went with orange). You can figure out your own colors. Nothing is "wrong". The shoes on the final painting are going to be white but instead of orange I decided to do a blue underpainting cause I wanted some neat blue shadows on them - see, even I break my own "rules". Jane's Perspective says "chill out". It's called "art", not "work".

I wanted the picture to have a dark background like the photo so for the opposite underpainting I also thought in terms of values. If the background was going to be so dark, to keep the painting light and exciting I painted the underpainting light shades of the opposite colors (the blue on the floor is thinking opposite of orange which is like brown which is basically what the wooden stage was all about - a lot more exciting than plain old brown wood - you'll see what I mean in the next step).

One final note: Whenever you paint an underpainting this way, stop a minute and take a good look. You will be seeing your painting in a whole new light. What about keeping some of this opposite color in the final painting? What about enlarging parts to make a fabulous abstract? Open your artistic mind to the unexpected. Turn the painting upside down and sideways. Can you see a whole new painting that could come from this one? Especially if you paint a sloppy underpainting - how loose and creative did you get?

Step 1

There are a whole bunch of ways to sketch your picture before you paint and a whole lot of mediums to use to sketch it with but I like to get into the painting as quickly as possible so . . . here's my thoughts about some of the other methods and why I discarded those ideas:

pencil - takes too long and I get too detailed with pencil, I've also found that sometimes the lead mixes with my paint and makes a sort of grey mess

charcoal - same mess but some artists swear by it. I get messy enough with the paint, don't need any extra black sooty mess around me or the studio

enlargers - maybe, if I have the time to adjust it so that there's no distortion (which is easy to get when the enlarger is out of level) plus on this piece it's the spontaneity that's important, not the accuracy of details

Grid - nope, not on this one (see the commissioned portrait blog for details on that method) Besides, I'm ready to paint, not measure little squares.

So you see, there are lots of other ways I could approach this painting but I've chosen to just jump in and start. Therefore, here I go as I load a paint brush that is larger than I might normally use so that I won't get too tight on the drawing part. I usually use whatever is left on my palette OR a little light brown or yellow ochre paint. Looking carefully at the photo and it's placement of objects I use this observation as my first guidelines for showing me how tall the piece should be, where it should come in relation to the sides of the canvas and any outstanding features. The more the photo correlates to the painting (8 X 10 to a 16X20, rather than an 8 X 10 to a 11 X 14) the easier this is to do. I can see that the head comes about 1/3 over from the right side of the canvas, the guitar is at a 45 degree right in the center of the canvas, etc) These guideline points are marked in with quick lines or slashes of paint. Now I have the parameters of my piece.

In this painting my subject is a human. There are all sorts of schools, books, rules, etc for drawing the figure. For example the full figure of a normal person should be 7 - 8 heads tall. Once you draw an egg shaped area for the head, you can measure down 7 - 8 heads (refer to your photograph or model) and make a mark so that you will know where the feet need to go. Likewise you can "measure" this way to find out where the waist goes, the arms and the hips. From there the legs and knees and bends can be "measured" and figured.

OK, so you hate to measure. Trust Jane's Perspective on this - you'll measure now, when you can correct everything easier or you'll end up completing the painting only to find out that something just doesn't look right and you'll have to measure later to find out what to do about it. Do it now and save some grief later. And it doesn't have to be ruler type measuring. Just line up your paint brush with the height of the head on the photo. Slide your finger back to note the length of the head. Move that measurement to the body or the arms or the leg on the photo and see how it compares. Is the forearm the exact length of the head? Is the chest two heads tall? Is the knee to the foot one and one half heads tall?

Likewise, measure the head that you drew on your painting. Use the same proportions that you discovered on the photo to measure how long the forearm needs to be or how wide the shoulders need to be. If the forearm of the photo was the same length as the head on the photo, you make the forearm of the painting as long as the length of the head in the painting. Get it? Make tiny slash marks for the proper lengths or widths or anything you want to measure and all you will have to do is fill in the blanks between these marks.

Here's another hint I use to create my figures. I draw stick people. Yep, good old stick folks so that once I start measuring I can just draw right over or rearrange body parts as necessary. You can sorta see the stick figure in this painting and you can see how the parts relate to each other. I add more details as I get the parts in the right spaces.

In this picture you can see how I change my sketch as I go along. Normally I just use one neutral color like a yellow ochre to draw my picture but in this demo I switched to a darker brown so that you can see the corrections I make as I go along.

Up close you can see how much the leg moved. As I created the body I start not only measuring but relating one part to another. When I drew an imaginary line straight down from the shoulder I saw that the foot should have been directly below. I had it too far to the left so I moved it in the sketch. Imagine how much trouble this would have been had I painted the whole painting and then tried to move the whole leg over.

You can get as detailed as you want with this initial sketch and if you find mistakes you can easily cover them with paint later in this project. Plus because this project is so spontaneous with the colors, some of these "mistakes" make turn out to be happy accidents. Look how, in this sketch, the leg seems to have motion. Likewise on the hip, as the guitar came into play I saw where the hip needed to come over to the right more. Again an easy fix at this point.

Like I said, you can take all day and draw details til the cows come home but aren't you ready to paint yet? I am. So here I go with one of the most unusual underpaintings that you will ever see.

Totally different

Today I'm starting my blog with Jane's Perspective on an American icon. This piece is the fifth in a series of famous American musicians, artists, and movie stars - the ones that are immediately identifiable. The title of it is "American Icon" but you can pretty much tell who it is. The other paintings in this series, so far, include Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Jim Morrison, John Lennon and another Elvis. Though they are all portraits, they are completely different from the last series of blogs because in these I am trying to delve deeper in my painting to create an "atmosphere" or "attitude" about the portrait. Instead of copying what I see, I use the subject to create what I "feel".

To make myself dig deeper into the "feel" of the person, place, and event I work hard to find or re-create (sometimes simply by copying on my printer) a sepia or black and white photo for reference so I will not be tempted to paint the colors that I see.

I mean, this picture of Elvis that I used as my reference just screams excitement. The black and white makes me use my imagination for the colors. The awkward pose stresses the "movement" of the moment more than just the posed figure. Now, I not only have a subject but I have ideas popping in my head for color and lively-ness (is that a word?).

But how did I get from black and white to the colors of the completed painting? Here's my step by step Jane's Perspective "secrets".

First of all, it takes nothing fancy in the way of supplies. This painting was done in acrylics but I could just have easily done the picture in oils. Oils might have taken more time since I might have to wait before I applied each layer of color to prevent excessive blending, and I really wanted to get to the finished product sooner. The brushes, as you can see, are just some old scruffy ones like I use in all my work. OK, sometimes I buy new brushes, but these old ones just work so well, I hardly ever discard them. Notice two things. First of all, none of the brushes are smalled than a #8 flat and secondly, notice the condition of the second brush from the top in this photo. That's not a special brush that you can just go out and buy. It's a square brush that has been literally "sanded" off on the edges as I paint on some of my rough surfaces. For a painting with as much texture (both real and impressioned) as this one will have, I like a rough stretched canvas. I stretch my own and gesso once with no further refinement or sanding and re-gessoing. AND in this case, the canvas already had a painting on it that had a whole different type of texture on it created from the underlying painting. I just gesso-ed over the old painting and began this one. Sometimes I don't even gesso over the old one - I just turn it upside down and begin the new painting. Talk about strange colors that appear!

My palette for acrylics is a Masters Stay Wet Palette. Boy, I wish I had a nickle for every time I recommend this palette to acrylic painters. But I really love it. Here is the palette as I start my work. The paper in the palette is stained from a previous smaller work but all I did was wash the paper off and set it back on the sponge in the palette. When I put out my acrylic paint (you can see a nice little blob of yellow ochre on the palette) and finish for the day, I just close up the set and can literally open the set two to three days later and the paint will still be wet. Yep, that's right, acrylic paint still wet after three days! This is great if I've created a color that I don't want to have to try to re-mix. The only thing I have seen people do "wrong" with this set is to spritz your paint with water. This is not a watercolor tool. You don't spritz the paint like watercolors, you just get the sponge wet. All the instructions are in the "kit" when you purchase one. By the way, one of my Jane's Perspective pet peeves is to see someone try to reconstitute their acrylics by spritzing them. All that does is make a big watery mess. Acrylics is a plastic kinda paint. It does not reconstitute like watercolor. In acrylic's dry state it's just hunk of plastic that basically repels water so why spritz?!?

Because this painting is so colorful, I thought I'd let you see the palette at the end of the painting. Sometimes even palettes can be inspiring. Next blog, I start the painting. You're gonna get a kick out of how strange it looks as I begin.

Hair and There

With all the measuring and trial and errors to the face completed you are now ready to either chunk it all and go back to painting still lifes and landscapes or you have found that you have a pretty good likeness and can continue on to the hair. Congratulations. For the hair you must do that squinty thing again so that you can see the shadows and follow my Jane's Perspective rule of using at least 3 colors to paint something. You need the color of the object, the shadow color and the highlight color. Mix these colors and test them on the baggie that contains you photograph. When you get a good match for the hair you can paint the shadows in with a medium size brush. Once you have the shadows in place (just blocked in basically) then you can paint in the rest of hair in its' natural color. With enough paint on your portrait's hair you can then pick up a round or liner brush to actually paint each little hair. It's sort of like brushing the subjects hair with this little brush. Without picking up any paint on this brush, you should be able to stroke through the shadow colors and hair colors to make the individual hairs. You run the paint strokes in the exact direction of the hair. Now, I admit that's going to take a while with one little pointy brush, so what I do to speed up the process (and keep my sanity) is to use my fan brush to "brush" the hair. I have various sizes of fan brushes so I can get into the small areas OR here's a good and economical idea - whenever anyone tells you that they "used to paint" but they don't paint anymore and want to know if you want their old paint brushes - grab them. Some of them will be in excellent shape and some will honestly be kinda scraggly. It's the little scraggly ones that you'll find useful here. Those scraggly bristles will create wonderful fine "hair lines". So, Jane's Perspective says that no brush is really a "throw-away". Even if you just use them to clean between the grout cracks in the bathtub - I've found a use for almost every old paint brush I've come upon.

Once you get all the hair strokes in place, you can add the highlights the same way. Squint you eyes so that you won't do too many - just the ones in the photo. Highlights are like accessories. Too many and it's not a highlight anymore, it becomes more of a "what's all that white stuff in their hair?" (Dont you just hate it when someone can't see your artistic vision?)

Once you get these beautiful hair strokes in place you can start on the details of the clothing. Remember to use three colors, the color of the cloth, the shadow color and the highlight color. In my example I had the misforture (or challenge) of creating plaid!!! What I found useful was to paint the background fabric color (in this case, white), then shade the white. I did this on both the hat and on the dress. Then I took a good look at the direction and colors of the plaid, used a dry brush of red and blue and crisscrossed the colors. The hat was rather simple to duplicate. . .

as was the bow, since it was just a matter of using the color of the bow, creating the shadows and then the highlights with my mixed colors. . . BUT

the sleeve was something else. The pattern of the plaid actually had to run with the folds. Careful observation was the biggest help. If you have stripes or a checkerboard pattern to paint you can easily see what I mean. Watch carefully how each line "jumps" as it goes over a fold or how each box of the checkerboard pattern, shifts. Then you may need to add a little more shadow. I can recommend a glazing technique here. Once the picture is dry, use a little liquin with your paint which will create a transparency. Painting a transparent shadow over the patterned area will create a delightful subtleness. The liquin will also help the oil to dry faster so that you can add more layers of shadow if needed. If you have no liquin you can thin your shadow color with mineral spirits but make sure the paint is good and dry or you will thin out and smear the whole thing.

There, now we have the whole portrait completed. I'm sure there's probably something I've left out or a question you have about your particular portrait so I'm available at LivePerson.com if you need some personal help. I'm also tempted to delve into the world of videos and would love to make a video of the whole process - I'm no movie star orVanna White-type person but if you're concentrating on what my hands do and not my whole persona, I might just have a video that you can use. Stay tuned and I'll be sure to let you know when and where that might just become available. And thanks for reading my blog. I hope you're excited about painting your first portrait. Next, let's see, how about a landscape or one of my "off the wall" music "portraits". Hmmmmmmm.

The completed portrait on the easel.

Details, details, details

OK, so you are following these instructions possibly because you have tried to do a portrait and it wasn't very successful and maybe you're just needing a pointer or two. If that's the case then all the tips I'll be telling you from Jane's Perspective should help. If you've never done even a drawing of a face, I'll try to include lots of the basics and you can go find tons of books and instruction takes with the drawing basics BUT that said, even though it's nice to know the basics you can STILL jump right into the painting and be pleasantly surprised with the results.

When I do a portrait I begin with the eyes for two reasons. First of all, the eyes are the windows to your soul and the key to the positions for everything else on the face. Secondly, if you get the eyes right everything else will just fall into place.

From your initial sketch and the fact that (hopefully) you painted AROUND the eye space, you can still see where the eyes need to go. If the face is still wet you may find it easier to do the shadows and highlights that you see around the eyes with a very small brush FIRST and then let the eye dry to do the details. Test it yourself and see. If you get the shadows and highlights around the eyes done (like you did all the fleshy areas except using a much smaller brush) and then you start painting the pupil and whites of the eyes and they just blur into the paint, then let the face dry before this next step.

And this step (my Jane's Perspective first step) is to paint in the colored iris of the eyes. You can test the correct color by dabbing a bit of the color on the plastic baggie that holds your photo. Once you have the round iris painted in, stop and walk away from the painting, turn and look at the face. Are the eyes looking where they need to look? Or are they too close, too far apart, or even cross-eyed? Are they too big or too small? If all you have is the iris you can easily correct by enlarging one side, moving one side over, or correct them by adding the whites of the eyes making adjustments as needed.

Still off? Go back to the basics. The distance between the eyes is the length of one eye. Use your paint brush as a measuring tool or actually use a ruler. You can get the irises to be the right size this way also. AND don't forget to measure from the photo. Sometimes people's eyes are close set or wider set. Whatever the proportion is in the photo should be the proportion in your photo. If the eye is 1 1/4 inch across in the photo for one eye (five 1/4 inch sections) and 1 1/2 inch across (six 1/4 inch sections) for the other eye, then your eyes should be proportionate (however you measure) so that one eye is 5 parts across and the other eye is 6 parts across. Make sense? E-mail me, I'll try to walk you through it.

Once you get the iris and whites of the eyes in their correct spaces add the dark pupil (and here is one of the only places I let you use black in your portrait ( too much black on a portrait and you'll never get those shadows to show up and without shadows your portrait will look flat and amateur). Jane's Perspective says that if you want the eyes to look deeper or more sincere (picture the cat from the movie Shrek) then you can exaggerate the size a little.

Now look at the photograph really good and note the actual shape of the iris. Doesn't it get "cut off" a little at the top and bottom? Basics and science tells us that the eye is actually a ball. This ball has the iris right in the center. What keeps our eyes from looking like they are actually popping out of our heads is the eye lids (both upper and lower). If you haven't already established that these parts of the eye come OVER the eye ball, then you need to bring them into place.

Next, (and you may have to wait for the paint to dry to do this step), take your smallest brush and paint in the eye lashes. Practise with your brush to be able to paint tiny lashes to the top and bottom of the eyes OR (and this is a little Jane's Perspective trick) paint eye liner to the eyes, clean the brush, and pull a tiny bit of the paint up or out from the eye liner to make the lashes. This gives you such a limited amount of paint that you can't hardly help making tiny lashes.

One final piece de resistance (best part) to the eye is to take a tiny amount of shadow color on your brush and shade right underneath the upper eye lid. This shadow pushes the eyeball back into it's socket and keeps you from having that protruding eyeball look.

At this point you can also take the end of your paint brush, dip it in white and CAREFULLY dot it on the eyes (one spot per eye) at the angle from which the light would be reflecting to give the eye that special glisten (another piece de resistance).

Once you get the eyes in place you can use them as your guidelines for everything else on the face. So they need to be as correct as you can make them before you go any further or everything else will be out of whack proportionately.

Assuming that you are happy with the eyes (or at least satisfied enough in your first try to go on to the next step - remember you'll get better with each portrait) you can paint the eye brows. Measure the photo to find out how far above the eye the eyebrow is along with exactly where the eyebrow starts in relation to the eye. You can do this by simply using your paint brush. For example, put the staff end of the paint brush to the end of the eye on the photo. Hold the brush horizontal on the eye and slide your finger to the part of the paint brush that corresponds with the other end of the eye. Hold your finger in place on the brush as you measure in the photo from the top of the pupil to the eye brow. How far is that distance? Half of the distance? 1/4rd of the distance? 1/3rd of the distance?

Next, take your finger off the paint brush. Measure the eye on your painting. Holding your finger on the point that corresponds to the end of the eye, look at the paint brush and estimate 1/4th or 1/3rd of that distance (or whatever the coordinating distance that your found on the photo for your eyebrow - NOTE - this is not the MATCHING distance but the coordinating distance, 1/2 of the distance or 1/3rd of the distance on the painting will not necessarily be the exact measurement as 1/2 or 1/3rd of the distance measured on the photo). Turn the paint brush vertically and make a tiny mark with a pencil or paintbrush to show where the eyebrow should be on the painting.

Now I went in great detail with that measuring thing because it will SO help you get your face "right". Skip these kind of steps and you will be working FOREVER to try to "get it right". Trust me - measuring helps. AND it helps so much that even with that one mark, you can keep measuring and marking until you get ALL the coordinates of the eyebrow and other parts of the face in place accurately.

In addition. Line up the straight edge of the paint brush vertically with the side of the canvas to see exactly where the eyebrow should begin and end in relation to the eye. If you held the paintbrush vertically from the inside corner of the eye, you can see if that is where the eyebrow starts or you can readily see that it may start straight up from the iris instead. Take a look at this photo and you will see that I found the eyebrow on the right (facing the painting) eye to start over the iris but the left eyebrow started over a little to the right of the inside of the left eye.

Eyebrows are tiny little hairs so paint them as such and don't give your face those Joan Crawford eyebrows. Paint tiny little hairs like you did the eyelashes, making the hairs grow away from the center of the face. If they look too "hairy" or thick you can go back and paint flesh color from the brow down into the hairs to make them smaller. (That was just a little extra trick - no extra charge, thank you).

Likewise, measure one eye on the photo and see how many eye lengths the nose is supposed to be. You already know that it should be half way from the eyes to the chin but that was the basic information. Now you need to make it look "right" so measure and make a little coordinating mark on your painting. (A review - if the nose is 1 1/2 eye length's long on the photo, then it will be 1 1/2 painted eye lengths long on the painting). AND if you hold the brush vertically from the inside of the eye or the iris, where does the side of the nose go?

The nose does NOT have lines at the side, only shadows and these shadows should already be in place. The only thing you have to paint (now that your guidelines are in place) is the little balls of the nose. There's one big one in the middle and two smaller ones on each side. Treat the nose as such and you can literally paint a round ball in the center with white and two smaller balls on each side which you can blend into a little flesh or pink color and voila, zee nose.

Add some shadow to the underside (just a little - no mustaches unless the photo calls for one) and a little to the sides and the nose is really easy to recreate.

Use the same techniques to measure for the mouth. Mark it's beginnings and endings and widths and fill in the blanks with a nice rosy flesh color for the lips. Got teeth showing? Yep, you have to paint each one but don't panic. Here's some tricks. Paint each tooth, paint the gums (if they show) and paint a line between the teeth. Yep, it'll look like snaggle-puss BUT you are going to go back to the teeth with a brush that is as close to the exact size of the tooth as possible and repaint it closing up that line until it's just the tiniest bit of a line (you would have needed a 00000 brush to paint it but you have created this tiny line by repainting the tooth, not by trying to paint that tiny tiny line - Jane's Perspective "It's not always what you paint but what you paint AROUND what you paint - aka the negative space". A shadow on the teeth under the upper lip and between the lower teeth and the lower lip pushes the teeth back into the mouth to keep from creating "buck teeth". Dark (almost black) shadows at the corners and more shadows on the side teeth give the mouth its proper curve.

For other details like hands, there are also a bunch of books to tell you the basics like bone structure, etc but if you will just MEASURE like I've shown you, you'll be surprised how much simpler they can be. You can use the eyes again. One eye length equals one pinky fingernail to knuckle, 1 1/2 eye length equals one pointer fingernail to first bend, 1/2 eye length equals how much shorter the pinky is to the ring finger, etc etc, etc.

And yes, I use the eye to measure everything so that if anything gets measured wrong or goes out of whack, then I've got the same standard to go to. Instead of comparing the measurements of the eye for this and the measurements of the nose for that (though logic tells me that if I get one right the next one should be right, etc) then I stay consistant.

Hope all of this makes sense. You CAN just wing it and try "eyeballing" your portrait or you can be more accurate and save yourself a lot of "fixing" later by actually USING the eyeball for measuring.

Uncomplicated skin tones

My perspective on painting (aka Jane's Perspective) is to make things as simple as possible. After all, they call in "art" not "work". OK, so maybe sometimes they call it "artwork" but I digress.

Anyway, to make your skin colors easy to mix I use this basic formula for Caucasian skin.

White plus cad red light or orange with a little yellow ochre

I use the same formula for various races with perhaps a little more darker brown or yellow ochre. I've read portrait painting books, taken portrait workshops, and explored all avenues for creating correct skin color and you can get really really complicated while mixing skin color but trust me, if you start with this basic formula you will be well on your way to the correct color. And how do you know that you have the correct color? That's where the baggie that's holding your photo comes in handy. Just dab a little color on the baggie right next to the skin color and test it. If it's not right you just wipe the dab off, mix some more, and try again.

Along with your skin color you'll need to have a nice size blob of white on your palette - not mixable white but a good titanium will do.

With these colors and the shadow that you've already applied (which should still be wet on the canvas) you'll be able to create the foundation of your painting.

A side note here. As you can see from the dates of my blog I've left you dangling after the shadow was applied. My apologies if you were keeping up and now your shadows are completely dry. That's what I love about oil, however. You can just reapply the shadows and then continue to this step. It is IMPERATIVE that these three colors (shadow, skin tone and the white highlight) be wet as you begin to blend or you will have a harder time blending the foundation.

So, apology noted, you can now take a good squinty look at your photo and find all the really light or highligted areas of your photo. Paint these into your painting with white. Don't be shy with the paint. Think of yourself as "sculpting" the portrait and in doing so you need to add a lot of white "clay" so that you can push and shove and mold the face into being. Once you have the whites in place, fill in the spaces left on the face, hand and any skin showing with the skin color that you mixed up. Don't leave any skin with blank canvas exposed.

At this point the portrait, in particular the face is still going to look really strange. Sorta like this:

Up close you can see the divisions so that you can see everything blocked in. At this point there are no gradual shadows, just abrupt color changes. Look at the chin and hands up close. . .

Now that you have plenty of paint to "sculpt" with, take a stiff clean brush and follow these instructions really SLOOOOW. With the brush, blend ONE stroke from a white area into the flesh color. STOP. Clean out the brush. Dry it off real well. Blend again ONE stroke from the white area into the flesh color. STOP. Clean out the brush. Dry it off real well. DO NOT blend back and forth (at least for now). I want you to learn this technique and then once you get used to it you can shortcut however you like but for now, do one stroke at a time. Actually it's a very zen-like move. And as you work you will start to see a blend happening especially if you have plenty of paint. If you start to see white canvas peak through the paint, then you don't have enough paint. Go back and add some more. Once you get all the whites blended into the flesh, do the same thing to blend the flesh into the shadow color. If you accidently go back and forth with you brush strokes here (from the shadows into the flesh instead of the flesh into the shadows) you will see what I mean when I say that you are going to "dirty up" your skin tone. Go from the flesh to the shadow in ONE stroke only, clean out the brush, dry the brush, and do ONE stroke again.

You will also notice the shadows start to disappear. You thought you had the shadows too dark but they are disappearing before your eyes. See, I told you not to worry. When are you gonna trust me?

Once you have a nice blend, get out your mop brush. If you don't have a mop brush get the softest brush that you have and start to blend again. You can do the same moves that you did with the stiff brush, cleaning between each stroke, and eventually go (dare I say it) back and forth. Can you see how soft and realistic the skin tone is beginning to look?

In this photo one side of the face has just been blended versus the right side of the face that still has its' sectioned look.

As you work, if you see the need to add more white, flesh, or more cad red light or red for those rosy glows, add the paint, use the stiff brush to blend, and then use the mop brush. If you have enough paint on the portrait you will notice that even if you "over add" or add too much of a color, you can just blend and blend and blend and it will disappear into the skin much like the way that the shadows have disappeared or gotten softer.

All of this blending MUST be done in one sitting or these "sections" will stay sectioned off and dry making it impossible to blend BUT the worse that can happen is that you have to reapply the colors. Gee I love oil paint.

You can also see in this step how difficult it would be to do a portrait in acrylic. With the drying time involved it's possible to do BUT you have to do very small sections at a time and you'll need something like a "stay wet" brand palette to keep your mixed skin color from drying out. Whenever my students want to switch from painting with acrylics to oils, I make them do two portraits, one in acrylics and one in oil - you can really feel the difference in the two mediums that way. Try it but don't get to cussing me when that acrylic portrait becomes so frustrating. I'm an oil portrait promotor and my hat's off to you when and if you become a skilled acrylic portrait artist. Seriously, you need to write your own blog to convince me that acrylic would be the way to go.