I’ve just finished work on a four-session portrait from a terrific local model, Sergio Janzen. This was done in my class as a demonstration/keep-the-students-enthused piece. 18 x 14″ oil on stretched linen.
I say study, or even sketch, because there’s only so much one can and should do when students are present, they need help. At the same time I always try to teach by practical example… it’s much better, and certainly humbling, to be struggling with the same problems as they are rather than calling plays from the sidelines with a wine glass in my hand. And if one of the oil painters has a question, I can show them how to work out the answer on my own painting or theirs. I think that’s an ideal way to learn
It would have been nice to have had another 3 hours to work out some things on Sergio’s portrait, but I did some of that from memory after the sessions ended. I would rather work from memory in those instances, simply because it keeps me sharper. I also am driven slightly nuts by the number of people using cell phone photos to work from away from the model, but they just laugh and call me old fashioned, which is somewhat true.
But I stick to my guns on this point, because the entire process is not, in the case of the student, to only “finish” a project, but to train their faculties, and one of those faculties involves taking three dimensional reality (nature) and recreating it in two dimensions (upon the canvas) without a machine doing it for them.
My palette was:
Yellow Ochre
Cad Lemon
Cad Orange
Cad Scarlett
Light Red
Flake White #1, with a touch of Liquin worked in
Alizarin Crimson
Viridian
Ultramarine Blue
Ivory Black
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