Portraiture Class 4

In a bid to force myself to not wimp out on painting in portraiture class today, I only took acrylics and cardboard with me to the class, no sketchbook!  This was my first ever attempt to paint a portrait and only the third time I've ever stuck a paintbrush into acrylic. I was pretty daunted!

To begin with I thought this was heading for disaster. I put some paint on the board and just basically had a load of featureless blobs. It looked like a 5 year old's picture. In the first few minutes of the class I had a vision of me ending up at the end with something that didn't even look human! But in the end it has turned out pretty okay for a first attempt I think. Well, its a human.

I painted with a 1/2" flat brush as I had a feeling, based on the type of acrylic portraits I've seen that I like, that broad strokes of paint would suit me more than fiddling around with a little pointy brush. I wanted to do a B&W painting with some of this nice 'Titanium Buff' colour thrown in. I thought I would use it for warm highlights on the face but when I saw that our model for today Natasha had blonde hair and was wearing a light beige scarf, it made a lot of sense to use the buff colour for those elements. Actually, another girl in my class who is also experimenting with acrylics did paint the face mainly in a near identical buff colour although she made hers with a mix of Umber and White.

I do really like the colours I chose. My tutor encouraged me to really be brave with the pure white. I had to reposition her left eye about 25 minutes before the end of the session to avoid falling into my boss-eye trap of last week! I think I could've gone a darker on the right eye. It was very dark to begin with but for reasons even unknown to myself I made it lighter.

An issue I realised I had in the first 10 minutes was that my surface board was too small for working with the flat brush and for the proximity I was to the model. But I really dislike starting again once I've started something, I'd rather just persevere and work with it, so I continued on. I think this turned out to beneficial as it meant I couldn't do my usual wasting time on the model's clothes!

Equipment: Cardboard back of an A4 sketchbook (my 'canvas'), Daler Rowney acrylics in Titanium White, Black and Buff Titanium. 1/2" flat brush (no idea what it is made of). I also used a smaller flat brush for the lips and a very small pointed brush for the eyes. I borrowed those from the tutor so no idea what they were.