Saturday, April 11, 2009

Oil portrait - Carter

I finally finished this portrait of my son Carter. I started this with the grisaille underpainting back in December but left it for a few months. Over the past week I have had a couple of good sessions with this and can now declare it is finished!

The initial grisaille with burnt umber and solvent.

The initial transparent glazes.

This is when I started with more opaque pigment in the glazes and got the ghostly look.


Got stuck back into it. Had to stop at this point as the background was wet and I started to pick up the green and blue when I was doing his hair and I though green hair wasn't a great loo.
I am really happy with this. It went through some really ugly phases and I had reached a point where I was scared to continue because I had invested so much time in it up until that point and I was concerned with stuffing it up. Then I had a night last week when I just wanted to paint and I didn't even think about it not working and it flowed.