Day 1: 3-hour monochrome/grisaille study

This is the first painting at Studio Escalier's Alla Prima Portrait workshop:

It is the closest to "true grisaille" that I have done - at least in a long time. ("True grisaille," I guess, would be only black & white paint; this is Williamsburg raw umber + titanium white. The raw umber that I normally use - Old Holland raw umber - is much closer to a yellow ochre - much more golden - than this raw umber. I used this colour 100% due to the fact that I found a partially used tube in the studio and thought I could get a wider range of values out of it than the Old Holland raw umber. Turns out, Tim used Williamsburg raw umber for his demo, so it was the same stuff, but really, you could use any raw umber, or black, or theoretically any other colour. Although, then it would be "monochrome" and arguably not "true grisaille." Which of course means absolutely nothing.)

"Alla prima" means "all in one go": you've got your 3 hours and that's it! There's no going back. So, yes, it's hard. We talked about it: it's scary, it's difficult. We are under pressure. We're not sure we can do it. We're walking a tightrope. As Tim mentioned, painting alla prima sums up everything that you have learned: you have no chance to go back and fix anything. The goal, as Jacques-Louis David said, is to "paint true and just the first go-round." (Let's call that a paraphrase.)

At the end of the 3 hours, I pretty much felt like I'm never going to get this. I have SUCH a hard time rounding form (i.e., painting forms with a feeling of depth, instead of flatness). This is the hardest part of painting, and pretty much what I come to Studio Escalier to learn, cuz nowhere else I've been has talked about the same things.

Anyway, enough blogging: I am off to do another monochrome study. I suppose I'll do a self portrait, since I don't have another model, don't want to paint from a photo, and don't have any still life objects that I want to paint at the moment.

Here I go!

(Oh, by the way, the model's name is Olivia, and the class today was taught by Krista Schoening.)

So...I did a second, "true" grisaille painting today, after class:


It's entitled Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Soviet Sympathizer. It took about 2 hours, and I fell asleep partway through.

The main techncial differences between this one and the previous one are:

• It is true grisaille: only black and white paint.



• It's a lot harder to look askance at yourself while you're painting yourself than it is to look at a model with all of your eyes.



• It's a lot smaller (roughly half the size), and as I mentioned, I only spent about 2 hours of painting time on it.



• I used Cremnitz (lead) white, not titanium white, so it's entirely non-edible.

Portrait Practice at Work

I worked on these portraits over a period of time, roughly starting around the time of the portrait workshop.

The first drawing I did on this page is the larger one of the Lebanese woman, on the left. (I took her photo in maybe 1990, and always liked the image, even though the photo is rather flat. She has beautiful henna designs on her hands, which of course I didn't draw.)

For this drawing, I was interested in starting from a single detail and working out from there, kind of like mapping your neighborhood, then working outward to map your city, then your state (or 'province' for us Canadians), then finally your country. (Because no matter what they tell you, it IS your country!) This is opposite to my usual working method of mapping out the country with all the provincial/municipal divisions, then "colouring them in." It's not that I dislike that method, but I was intrigued by this method, and wanted to give it a shot. I know that people work this way (Richard Schmidt for one), and just wanted to give it a shot myself.

It seems to me that it is slightly more demanding, as all of your tiny measurements have resonance in the larger structure, whereas, if you start large and work down to the smaller details, the worst you can do is misplace an eye (as opposed to, for example, distorting her cheek, like I did).

Another effect that I tried was to make the features darker and clearer and leave the rest slightly more hazy. Unfortunately, I didn't think of doing this until well into the drawing, so I kind of attempted to retroactively fit the effect into the drawing, with limited success.

I was pleased with the feel of the flesh, and the rendering of the features in general. (The eye is slightly misplaced, the mouth was too large, though I may have fixed that...and the hands are way too large. And the cheek too far out.) Despite its faults, though, I actually like the effect. I like the shapes of the fingers (even if they're a little large), and I'm pleased with the contour of the cheek. The reason I didn't do a more finished piece is that the hand was too far gone, and I just plain didn't feel like working on her head covering.

Next up was the portrait of the woman on the right, drawn from a photo of a portrait bust in the Louvre.

I've Just Seen a Face

This is my second attempt to "do one thing, then move on," although to be honest, it sort of digressed from that purpose into "getting an entire face done colourfully" - which is a legitimate goal in itself. It's just good to try to do ONE thing when painting, instead of change your mind halfway through. That said, I'm not at all displeased with the result:

The best thing about this painting, in my opinion, is the colorfulness of it: I tend to use Earth colours and wind up with muddy, slightly monochrome paintings. In this one, I ratcheted up the chroma and got a slightly more colourful result than usual.

The worst thing about this painting, at least in terms of the actual painting process, was that I started out wayyyy too light in the darks, without realizing it, and had to totally go through the shadow section and reinforce the entire area. That sucked, since I was well on my way into the portrait before I realized that my shadows were too weak to support the lights. It also made the face look as though it were pivoting around the nose and kind of folding in onto itself. (It still has that effect, slightly.) I needed to bulk up the area slightly below and to the right of the nose. Oh yeah: some of the reflected light in that are was ridiculously too light (a leftover of my ridiculously too light shadows), which, come to think of it, the "pillar of the mouth" on the lower-right-side of the lips still seems a little too bright. (I just learned "pillar of the mouth" in the Eliot Goldfinger book; if you paint the figure and don't have that book, drop what you are doing and run like hell to Amazon.com and order it right now!) I'm planning on being buried with my copy when I die, so, sorry.

This painting, it turned out, was the last of the portraits I did before the Alla Prima Portrait Painting workshop at Studio Escalier. I had potentially the most stressful three weeks of my life just before leaving: a HUGE project at work was just ending (the original due date came and went, and we agreed on a deadline a week later, which seemed more to prolong the pain instead of actually assuage it), a huge freelance project loomed (I wanted to finish before leaving for France; I didn't, exactly), the "Arts & Crafts Room Nazi" in my condo unit more or less outlawed oil painting in the communal art room, and I was summoned before the condo Board to explain my reaction to that pronouncement (let's not get into that), I basically decided to move out of the condo unit in response.

So, far from getting dozens of paintings accomplished, as I'd somehow naively thought I could, I got more like half a dozen done.

Do One Thing, Then Move On

After painting several oil portrait sketches in 3 hours and always coming out with something around 70% finished, I decided on a different tack: I would attempt to paint ONE THING completely before moving on. I didn't do a block-in of the entire face: I blocked in the nose, painted the nose, then moved on.

This was the result:

I was quite happy with this painting, actually, since it represented the most "finished" thing I've done in a long time. Even though the entire portrait isn't finished, what I did work on is basically finished. OK...so I have a finished nose! Well, that's OK. I have enough unfinished everything paintings at home that it is nice to have something a little different. Also, it was interesting to start a painting from one small detail and expand from there, as opposed to blocking in the entire head (or even figure), then "fill in" the contour.

Actually, while I was painting this, I felt incredibly confident: it felt as though every stroke was the right one, and I could do no wrong. (Except, for some reason, the far cheek. I had a heck of a time pitching the angle correctly, although I think it ended up pretty good. Actually, I learned from that: the contour can be left as kind of a "detail" - you don't necessarily need to draw the contour 100% accurately at first. Sometimes, these things just resolve themselves out of everything else that you paint!)

My painting buddy, Isabelle, thought I was joking (or crazy) when I said I was going to "paint a nose".