Here's the result of tonight's figure session, a 3 hour portrait which I did in oils. It was pretty fun, but I'm not too stoked with how the portrait turned out; I like it in the sense that I tried something I'd never done before, but I don't like it in the sense that it's... not very good. xDThe new thing I did was at about 2 hours in to the process I just didn't like where it was at all, the drawing was getting worse, some of the colors and marks were getting muddy, and just overall it looked pretty meh. So I grabbed a paper towel and wiped the whole thing pretty firmly which took off a lot of the paint, softened all the edges like crazy, but left a ghost of the image there which I spent the last hour working out of.
The process itself was good cause that's how I'm most comfortable working; start soft and find the forms inside of a blur, and if it's not working go back to soft and find them again. But that's digital, with this after I wiped everything down I realized that every color in the piece had changed and been affected by another color and I had no idea how to mix any of them accurately to paint on top of the ghost, so the last hour was just spent clarifying the background, adding highlights and not knowing what to do.
I think ultimately that's where my biggest weakness with oil is right now. I can mix up some flesh tones and it'll look decent, but actually mixing up the exact color that I'm seeing in life is just confusing still, mixing up a color that you're seeing in relation to other colors but mixing in relation with just white is... mindbreaking. I think that's where most of my struggle is going to be with figure painting class this semester, but that's why it's fun! So for this portrait, it's a failure moving towards success, hurrah!
Have a good one!
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