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portrait painting
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Message
Its much more like me than the previous one which my wife did not like . i Cant do portraits and find them very difficult in Acrylics.
What do other artists think about portrait painting .
Posted
I've drawn myself once or twice, but have never tried a self-portrait in full, glorious, living colour ..... I suspect the world just isn't ready for it. Many, many artists - perhaps most? - have painted self-portraits, but it's never really interested me. I did paint a couple of other people - but again, not many. Is it difficult ..... well: yes! You only need to be out by a fraction, especially around the mouth, and the likeness has gone - they say the thing you need to get right is the eyes, but I find mouths far more difficult, because they're so mobile. In passing and irrelevantly, I really dislike those photographic-type portraits of the great and the good, showing every damn' piece of furniture and ornament in the room with them - there was a portrait of Lord Woolf, the former Chief Justice, for example. It was technically brilliant, it looked like him, but it was more of an historical document in paint than a work of art.
But it's just possible I could be prejudiced.......
Posted
Acrylics are an awful medium? Well - I could quarrel with that, but wouldn't want to distract attention from the advice Marialena gave - maybe we can discuss this in the acrylic forum; I might put something on there tomorrow, a bit tired now.... I do agree they're not ideal in terms of paint handling and manipulation, and you do need a different approach with them: but I've been using them since around 1968, and wouldn't have carried on doing so if they were so awful....
Posted
An interesting post. It's the human face that's always fascinated me. Landscape, still life etc...these are things to tuck behind and around images of people. When I idly doodle on a scrap of paper, I doodle faces. Each to his own, I guess. That said, I'm not keen on portraits. The whole point of a portrait is to get a likeness...I either get a likeness straight away, or I have to fiddle with the tiny differences that make a likeness. I never start to paint a portrait unless I've got a likeness in my drawing...very often I lose that likeness during painting. Frustrating. When this happens you get the dread words ' you can see who it is'...a polite way of saying 'it doesn't look like him/her'. As far as self portraits go, I've never done one I thought looked like me. But my family, friends, and art group pals all recognized me instantly. (These were caricatures...portraiture at its most extreme). ????
Syd, you say you don't like portraits, but you should be encouraged by the one you've shown here. One minor observation I would make regards composition...I would place the figure higher up on the canvass. You've got your face right in the middle, that leaves a space above the head that looks awkward. (Just my opinion...ignore it at will).
I hope you will try more portraits, Syd.
Posted
I was almost reaching for my popcorn reading this thread.... haha.
As you can all tell I love portraits, to capture the person is essential with a great likeness too and I just love the challenge that presents - whilst using acrylics, which I must say work very well with me given I used to use oils BC (before children). We all have our own way of working be it tracing or sketching many lines which are rubbed out. And I always aim for a very good likeness from the phot I work from.
I used pencil on the canvas then hairspray it before adding transparent gesso to it. Work's very well.
I like Syd's selfie...not my style of work, yet I do like it. Maybe the forum users should do their selfie too. :)
Posted
I like Syd's portrait too...nice looking chap Syd, much like meself!!
Seriously though, I have done but one or two portraits and they are very hardb to do, or I found them so. I will have another bash at my daughter's fizzog but I dont hold much hope. One of the reasons is that I, like others hereon, find the human form pretty boring (well, obvious examples and circumstances excepted). My brother did ten years of life classes for the pure enjoyment, for me thats ten years too long in purgatory. I'd almost rather paint dancing hares...Lord preserve us.
Anyway, I'm only just starting to understand its the wooden bit I hold and not the bristles...
TTFN
D
Posted
Oh dear, AG's opened the floodgates now. Here's two of me...I posted them in the gallery briefly...chickened out, and hopefully took them down before they were seen. They are both me according to family, friends and art group pals...but I don't think so. Left, watercolour. Right, a drawing made from myself in a magnified shaving mirror (to get the distortion) then painted in photoshop. These are a few years old, I'm still recovering from the experience.
Posted
I completed my most successful portrait last week (I posted in the gallery but not many comments to it) and not sure if my method is cheating but I load the photo into photoshop, crop it and stretch it to how I want it and posterize the colours (to various degree's, either extreme like this to refine the image to its basic shapes or less so but reducing the pallette makes it more obvious to my novice eye what exactly is going on with the shading etc)
I spend a good deal of time with pen and pencil to get the proportions right, I don't trace the image but I do rather a lot of measuring where the pupils should be and where the mouth ends etc before I start to paint and try to methodically build it up. Anyway I was well pleased with the result...
Posted
You never know when you post a piece whether it'll be noticed, or disappear in nano-seconds - that's the fact of life with a live gallery. It may help if you explain the method, medium (a bit hard in this case to settle on just one), and scale when you post the picture, so that people have an idea of how you achieved the result, and can visualize it in terms of scale. I did see your (Daveyboyz's) painting at the time, but didn't comment because of the large number of other posts.
And Lew - I refuse to believe that you possess that much chin (picture on the left); but making a caricature is often a good way of achieving some life in a portrait - obviously for a serious attempt, you tone down the caricature element, but because these focus on and exaggerate notable features and expressions they have to have a degree of accuracy in order to be recognizable - and so can form the basis of the portrait.
Posted
Interesting to see the 'selfies'. I don't think your method was cheating Daveyboyz, and I like the result. (I don't recall seeing it in the gallery...the pics do whizz through...and it may have been before my time). I'm always interested in methods of working, and many pros seem to sail pretty close to the wind in the 'cheating' stakes. If it works for you...use it. Robert, my pics were supposed to be caricatures but I lacked the nerve (and skill) to make them more outrageous. Even so, I'm fairly sure my chin (and forehead) aren't that bulbous...the pic on the right was my form of cheating...drawing myself from a distorted image in my magnified shaving mirror. I was hoping it would provide the caricatured effect I was after. To succeed, they had to be a likeness. I don't think they do, but people who know me say they're...erm...me. So, as you can plainly see from the two pics...I'm a huge chinned, chin-less wonder.
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