Saturday, April 1, 2017

What He Saw or a Portrait with Lotsa Texture

What He Saw
9x12 inches acrylic on gessoed masonite 
  
This time around I'm showing a small 9 x 12 inch acrylic portrait that I just finished. I've been working on getting the 'sunlit” look. One of the guidelines for working with values (shades of black and white) is to indicate what the light is hitting and what is in shadow. For artists, it's usually expressed in a ten step value scale.....with zero being white and ten being pure black.
In a couple of art books I've been reading, it says that sunlight is best represented by using a four step value separation....in other words any object in the sunlight has a shadow four steps from the value of the highlight value. I know......sounds all stuffy and “math-y”. But in practice it's pretty kool.

I set up my 10 step value scale beside my canvas, and each time I painted a bit of color on the face, I first compared it with the portion of the value scale that I was working with. And it did indeed help me to judge the respective values of the shadows underneath the nose and chin and neck.

As a bit of an extra challenge, I wanted to add in a bit of funky texture to the painting. The background was just broken colours of a landscape, to be painted in loosely. So before I painted in the background, I laid a stencil on the background, and scooped a palette knife's worth of white paint over the background area. This left a slightly raised area on the background that only showed in a certain light. When I painted the background over this, it visually totally obscured the pattern......unless it was viewed in just the right light angle. Sorta a “secret visual surprise”!


 

Next painting I intend to go the further step and work on learning more techniques of “sunlight”. I want to play with colour in shadows and with “bounced” sunlight.


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