Portraiture - The fifth and final class

I decided to have another stab at acrylics today in portraiture class.  I liked what I produced last week but as this was my final class - really final as I won't be able to sign up for any more art classes for a very long time - I wanted to try and really achieve the type of portrait I've been hoping to get to!

When the model, Chris sat down the teacher noted that he sat with a tilt.  I looked at him and said to the class that I thought the way he sat tilted made him look like a politician - something about his face also made him look like one. So something I really like about how this portrait turned out is that I do think it looks like a portrait of a politician. Not that he is one in fact. If you could see the whole A3 page it is even more evident I think. I left the background unpainted and I think it looks like he has been cut out to be put on a placard or billboard.

Unlike last week, I decided not to mix the colours on the palette. I put a load of Primary Blue acrylic on the palette and basically put down all the areas of the model that were in shadow, regardless of how much shadow they were in. Then I completely washed the brush and put down pure Titanium White on all the areas where I could see the light was directly hitting him. I wanted to take a photo at this stage so I could put it on the blog and also because I actually thought it looked pretty good at that stage - I was almost tempted to just call it as finished there and then! That part only took about 10 minutes.  But I couldn't get to my bag to get my camera as my bump was too big to squeeze betweem the easels and I had a vision of sending them all flying like a row of dominoes.

After that, I worked on putting some of his features in. I didn't want to mix the blue and white on the palette because when I tried it it produced a kind of third colour and when I tried that out on his face it looked flat and lifeless. What I wanted was streaks of the blue and white which merged on the canvas. I'm really pleased with how this turned out, which is a relief as it would have been really frustrating to walk away from my final opportunity to attend a portraiture class feeling like I hadn't managed to produce what I'd been hoping to from signing up for the course.

I'm going to miss this class though. It has been a lot of fun, the other students were really nice, and I'll miss the teacher's comments which have included lines like 'you've made his eyebrows look like an untrimmed hedge', 'you need to give her more brain' 'that's really good! Oh no, actually it's not.'  He's so funny.

I also took a photo of the model this week. It is at a slightly different angle as I stood up to take it but I thought it was about time I had a photo of a model so I can make a comparison!

Here also is my homework practise I did for a pair of eyes in profile: