Temperature Painting Numbah Two!

Moooore portraits! This one's a bit rushed as we had an event happening at the pod on Saturday, which is usually when I do these, so I had to jumble this together after class on Friday, haha.

I still need to work on my facial construction, there's some wonkiness going on in all of these, but I'm getting more comfortable with oils. This will be our last monochromatic portrait as well, as on Wednesday our glorious teacher Ron Lemen is going to take us in to the wonderful world of the Zorn palette, which is titanium white, yellow ochre, cad red light, and ivory black. It's a cool palette, well actually a warm one, but it is cool in the too-cool-for-school sense because the actual cool colors are derived simply from neutralizing the warm colors. Amidst all the hot yellows, reds, and oranges you get out of the cadmium and ochre, dulling them down will give you relative blues, greens, and purples, so you can pretty much get a full color spectrum out of just two colors plus black and white. It's a pretty rad bit of color theory, and should look awesome for portraiture. I am excite!

Temperature Painting

Here's a portrait done for our Head Painting class. The current technique is to use only burnt umber and titanium white, using both pick-out and opaque techniques. The result, if done correctly, is a temperature painting where the lights are all cool and the shadows are all warm. I believe it could technically be deemed a grisaille technique.

Essentially the way it works is that you have two ways to get value; burnt umber is your darkest value, and thinning it will give you warm, transparent lighter values, and adding titanium white will give you cool, opaque lighter values. Using the two, you can make a separation of temperature between your lights and your darks, which is a powerful compositional tool and an essential part of color theory. I'm really glad we're learning to use oil paint this simply, beginning with only value, now value and temperature, and we're going to be gradually working in color; I'd definitely recommend this route if you want to get in to traditional media.