Hi Y’all,
I’m continuing to work on my self portrait. In general, it is taking shape well. I have been looking at Alice Neel and Lucien Freud’s work to get more ideas of how to incorporate light and shadow into my painting. I plan to enter my portrait into a competition, whose deadline is only a few days away.
As you’ll notice, there’s a push pin on the left corner of my chin. That’s because I painted this painting on a record. Yep, a 12-inch LP. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about the chin hole. I could spackle it, maybe, or leave it. I do kinda need the hole to be able to hang the record, unless I get the record framed somehow. Such are the dilemmas of painting on records. I might give painting a rest for a couple hours. It seems I get too worked up and focused on minute details if I spend a long stretch on painting.
Man, I’m kinda tired now.
I’ve always thought that too many paintings fail to have true shadows in them. Shadows are one of the most difficult things to paint in my experience. Can’t go wrong with Lucien Freud, though, I love his work, and some have great shadows! (e.g. http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/freud/freud.reflection.jpg)
Hi Jen,
Thanks for visiting. Shadows are some of the most difficult things to paint. I sometimes have trouble differentiating between a warm shadow and a cool shadow. A teacher told me a rule about warm light = cool shadow, and cool light = warm shadow, but then I got stuck on trying to figure out if light was warm or cool. Re: Lucien Freud: I like how gestural his paintings are. I feel like I’ve caught someone in some sort of moment when I look at his work. What kinds of paintings do you do?
Used to do oil on canvas… these days mostly acrylic in my kids rooms (e.g. fantasy material on their dressers, a height board where I paint something evocative of their life over the last year each year, etc etc).
I never really learned the details about what colors to use in shadows, it always amazes me how non-intuitive that is.
I love Lucien’s greenery as much as his people. I’ve always wanted to have one wall of my bedroom be a plant mural by him, not that that’s actually possible
.
Jen,
I never really learned the details about color theory, but I think it gets pretty in-depth and non-intuitive. It seems so much of drawing and painting (at least in the representational style) is about learning to see. I struggle the most when I don’t know exactly what I’m seeing. I’ll see a shadow, but I won’t know how to classify it, or how it relates to other shadows in the piece. Or sometimes I’ll see too much and forget about the harmony and bigger ideas of the whole composition.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of L. Freud’s landscapes. You could probably lead tours of your house if you got him to paint a mural for you.
Don’t know where to find a picture, but I saw it at the Tate…
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=4556&searchid=10308
Hmmm here we go
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/F/freud/freud_plants.jpg.html