Day 5 Just discovered that you can do paragraphs on a blog post! Sorry about that as Day 1 to Day 4 must be a bit hard to read! We were going to have another portrait demo today with a different model. Charles asked everyone if they wanted him to do a full portrait or if they wanted him to do instructional studies. We all opted for studies as we felt we could learn more that way. However, when he said ‘studies’ I wasn’t prepared for what followed, which was an outstanding masterclass in painting a portrait. Charles had the model pose to give him a three quarter view of her face. He started his drawing in the usual way by drawing a rough oval of where he wanted the head to be placed on the page. He then went to the left eye, which was almost hidden by the bridge of the nose. He drew that by taking his pencil over the lid line and then straight down into the pupil of the eye, which was lightly shaded in, He then indicated the iris with darker shading. Once he got into defining the first eye, he started to erase the oval line that he had put to place the head on the paper. He then took a pencil line straight over the bridge of the nose (which stayed in the completed painting) to find the inside corner of the right eye (the right as you look at the model). Having drawn this eye in he used this reference point to draw the nose, lips and point of the chin. He stressed that you do not put a line under the chin as this cuts it off from the neck. A few strokes added some hair, very loosely indicated. Charles then started by painting the nostrils first (burnt sienna and a little cad red). He then added a touch of cobalt and allow that to be softened down towards the upper lip to create a shadow shape. He then added some alizarin to the upper lip making the tone darker where the lip was in the light and lighter as the lip went into shadow. He then painted the left, almost hidden eye. A dark line showed the bottom of the eyelid and paint was taken from this line straight into the pupil and then the iris (although little of this eye could really be made out). The eyebrow line was put in at this point taking it right into the hair at the side of the face. He then moved to the eye which was more visible, painting the line of the lid in a lighter colour (burnt sienna) than the left one, once again allowing the paint to flow into the pupil and into the iris. He painted the hair adjacent to this eye – he always tried to connect shapes and the hair is painted in sections as he goes along. His brushstroke, when painting the pupil, is light and dancing and produces a varying tone with flashes of light in it. The more visible eye was more in the light than the other one, hence the lighter tone for the lid line. Charles added a patch of cobalt to the inside of the right eye to show the shadow of the socket and also allowed this tone to drift under the inside corner of just under the eye. He added a cad red dot in the inside corner of this eye and it is amazing how just this little shape makes the eye come alive. He then turned his attention to the area of the chin and put a light skin tone (cad red light/yellow ochre/cobalt) on that allowing it to be drawn down over the neck and up the jawline – all done with one sweeping and turning stroke of the brush. He allowed this skin tone to drift out into the adjacent hair. Charles then painted the cheek that was in the light. He stressed that you must paint away from the light, not into it. This means that he put his brush loaded with a slightly stronger skin tone on the point of the cheek where the light was strongest and then he pulled his brush away from that point, i.e. painting away from the strongest light. He swept the pigment on his brush back toward the hair line and formed the cheek shape. He then put a few finishing touches by re-stating some of the darks in the hair and that was the study completed. He made the point that on the shadow side of the face, the eye should appear to merge with the hair and stressed that we should not make the hair too dark in that area, but to ensure that the tones were similar in value. The hair adjoining the eye which was in the light had a darker tone to give a greater tonal contrast as both the hair and eye on that side of the face were in the light. All the time Charles was painting he was writing instructions and notes all over the paper. He wrote: Hair far side (shadow side) not too dark, seems to merge with eye – Chin colour painted out into the hair, darker hair added later – Soft eyebrow near the light – In drawing no strong chin line, just light oval, hair boundary softly drawn – Lips, start with the separation between top and bottom lip – You can’t paint what you see! – The more you add, the worse it will look (I had asked if you should put in expression lines, etc) – No expression lines unless it is a very old guy – Less contrast in shadow – Less is more! These were just some of the notes added on the paper to guide us – gems of wisdom in fact! They all take a bit of thinking about but they are spot on advice I feel. Charles then went on to do a study of the model face-on. He used the same method for drawing the face as before and the same method of building up the features when he started painting. He tends not to put an overall wash of skin tone on first but chooses to concentrate on the important features, i.e. the eyes and mouth and get those clearly defined. The nose is always somewhat underplayed especially when he does a full face portrait, when the nose is really only suggested. However, the nostrils are always clearly defined and the tone from this area is taken down towards the top lip picking up on any shadow shapes that need to be described. There is always a little shadow shape at the corner of the section of the mouth in shadow, which seems to soften the mouth and give it a better expression. Charles painted the line where the top and bottom lip meet first, allowing the pressure on his brush to be harder in some of the line and then lighter in others, which gives a much more realistic mouth. He then painted the top lip in alizarin with a touch of cad red light. He made the top lip darker in tone on the light side of the mouth and then lightened the tone as it moved into shadow. I know this sounds opposite to what one would expect but he says that the mouth tends to lighten in shadow and that is what gives it a curving shape to follow the dental arch. One of the most interesting things about the face-on portrait was his treatment of the skin tones of the cheeks and neck. These were, once again, done by loading his brush with his skin tone mix of pigments, some very light, some stronger and then keeping his brush firmly on the paper until he had moulded the features with paint. He is brilliant at ‘skipping a beat’ with his brush so that any white paper highlights are preserved. Once again there was no hard definition of the chin and Charles just swept the paint down, darkening the tone under the chin with the addition of a little cobalt to the skin tone mix, into the neck making it look cohesive. He finished the portrait by adding a few more strokes for the hair (although most of it had been painted as he went along and as he did adjacent sections) and he also added a dark tone to the top of the model’s top to add some emphasis. In the afternoon we had a choice of two models to do our attempts at a portrait from. I chose the one that Charles had used (mainly because the other one had white blonde hair and I hadn't a clue what I would do with that!). I felt that my portrait turned out much more as I had wanted my portraits to look for ages. Charles came up when I was considering if I had done enough and told me to stop right there and not add anything else as it was excellent as it was - praise indeed! As I said, he is a very kind man! He was also generous enough to tell me that I had improved a lot over the week. Not sure about that, but it was nice of him to say it. I have posted the portrait I did on the gallery today. I think we all felt very privileged to have been able to watch such an amazing masterclass in portrait painting. Charles was talking all the time, telling us exactly what he was doing and why he was doing it. He was answering questions and writing copious notes on the paper he was painting on. The amount of information he gave was awesome and I hope I have managed to remember the majority of it correctly. I didn’t take any notes at all on the course as I preferred to watch Charles intently and if I was writing I felt I would miss bits. Today’s painting ended up being a wonderful demonstration of a master at work. All Charles’s demo paintings were for sale to students at the end of the course and a lady I met on the course was lucky enough to secure this last one. No doubt she is busy studying all the notes as I write! This course has been one of the best experiences of my life and could well turn out to be life-changing on the painting front. However, that depends very much on my ability to apply what I have learned. It is one things to listen and write about it all and quite another to put it into practice. I’ll have to see how I get on in the coming months. I am already planning to go on another course when Charles next visits the UK, although he is doing two abroad next year – one in Tuscany and one in Amalfi – very, very tempting!