Felix D'Eon

Diary ~ Oil Painting demonstration Number #2

March, 2006

I'm starting a long pose of Eduardo today; Eduardo is a very close friend of mine and I have long wanted to do a portrait of him. Unfortunately, he will under no circomstance model for photographs, so there are none of the usual photos of the model posing and enjoying themselves during breaks that I normally post. That said, we had a great time, and I do draw him quite often. The description of the process follows.

The drawing above is the preliminary drawing, which took up an entire session (usually between 3 and 4 hours). I normally do a variety of gesture drawings first, but by coincidence he sat in this pose on his own at the very beginning, and I liked it so much that I decided to keep it. I will later transfer the drawing to canvas and start the underpainting, with a landscape invented for the background. This took up the entire first session - next week I will start painting the oil itself.

Before the model got here for the second session, I primed it orange with an oil paint base, and transfered the original study to the canvas. the canvas is somewhat large; it measures 22 by 28 inches.

The photo above shows the canvas as it appeared at the end of the second session. I had never painted on the orange ground before, and found that it was giving me difficulties (it was so bright, that it was hard to judge the proper skin tones against it), so I early on gave the entire background a wash with raw umber to tone it down. This helped considerabley. However, the first session was something of a struggle, and I am not completely happy with it at this point.

Before the model came for the third session, I gave the background another wash, this time with burnt umber, and darkened it a lot. This helped so much, and has made my task of judging skin tones much easier. The photo above shows how the canvas looked about a third of the way into the third session. I started to work out his face and shoulders

Here is the painting about half way through the third session. Unfortunately, the photo is a little blurry, but as you can see, I added glaze to the shadow side of his face, chest and arms, and put in middle values on his chest and face. Later, when it dries, this will make it easier for me to work in the light values on the most well lit portions of his body.

And finally, this is how the painting looked at the end of the third session. I reinforced the shadows with transparent glazes on his legs and thighs, and put a middle and warmer tone across his stomach and lat areas. In classical oil painting technique, the shadows are always painted with thin layers of transparent oil, which allows the lighter underlaying layers to show through. This gives the shadows an unparalled luminosity, but also requires forever to do, since you have to wait for each layer of glaze to completely dry before you can add another. The shadows are still in their early stages at the moment, but next week the figure, especially in his face and chest, will start to approach some kind of finish, at which time I will start to worry more about the negative space. Check back next week for updates!