Oil Portrait - Zorn Palette Extended 2

Update on yesterday's portrait, went in and added all the bangles and jangles and fangles. They didn't turn out as metallic as they should be, I need to take more care when mixing up their colors and values, but overall I'm satisfied with how this piece has turned out, I think the flesh is working well and the thin paint in the background is sitting back in space pretty good.

Some things that'll need to be worked on will be getting a more accurate likeness to the reference, getting more color variation, and making some more interesting compositions. Slowly but surely getting more comfortable with oils, though.

Oil Portrait - Zorn Palette Extended

Here's another oil portrait. Like that Steven Assael copy, this was the extended zorn palette, which is titanium white, cadmium yellow pale, yellow ochre, cadmium red light, alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue, and ivory black. Despite only having 7 colors, it's a pretty complex palette to work in, when you learn about using relative grays to get warms and cools with just the 4 colors of the zorn palette, adding more chromatic colors and a real blue gives soooo many possibilities that it's hard to decide what to use, and we're still nowhere near using a full color palette, haha.

As far as this particular painting goes, I'm kinda on the fence with it. I like some of the color and handling of paint, but my drawing is way off and it's not working too well compositionally. The reference also had really crazy light so it was hard to tell which planes were which, so my lighting ended up being somewhat inconsistent. But, practice makes perfect I suppose.

Fechinesque Portrait

Here's my latest dabblings with oil, attempting yet another portrait with the Zorn palette, and this time trying to emulate Fechin's way of markmaking. I think color-wise it's getting much better, but still a long ways to go, and slowly but surely my drawing problems are improving. And working with goopy, squishy, blendy oil paint is always fun, haha.

Later this week I'll update this, since we're going to be going back in to it with three additional colors added to the palette, so we'll see if the colors can be bumped to the next level and closer to full white light.

Oil Portrait - Zorn Palette

Here's my latest shindig with oil. We are breaking in to.... COLOR!@i&%!*@U#*EasGsj

It is hard. 8|

Yeah, this is my second attempt at this piece. The first one turned out totally abysmally so I emailed our glorious instructor and he had a good lol and explained the many areas uponst which I could improve, and this is my second go after that, haha. It's still pretty meh as far as the colors are concerned, but it's better than the first one and I think I'm starting to get comfortable with handling the brushes and the paint. I also added linseed oil in to the equation, which makes the paint really juicy and delicious and makes me feel like a for reals alla prima painter.

This was really fun though and it's a great way to approach color theory, he's beginning us with a Zorn palette, which is simply white, yellow, red, and black. Through those colors, a whole relative spectrum can be mixed; white and black gives a gray which appears to be a relative blue, gray and red makes violet, gray and yellow makes green, red and yellow makes orange, so there you've got your red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet! It's an easy introduction to adding color and temperature to the things we've been learning about value and handling the paint, so though it's quite confusing and will take lots of practice I'm totally excited to see where this all goes.

Hooray for oils!