Although Id painted a landscape I had not painted a face in years, so I didn’t really know where to start, fortunately for me Sky Arts was running a Portrait Artist Of The Year live stream event, where every week a new celebrity sitter would come on a live stream from 10-2, a former Portrait Artist Of The Year contestant/winner would paint this person and it was encouraged to paint along at home. I took this opportunity to sharpen my skills.

below are some of the paintings in chronological order.

Week 1

The portrait above was of professional dancer Akram Khan, I enjoyed painting him but struggled as my reference image was a photo of a computer screen so it was hard to get any detail or likeness working properly, I feel like as a study it was successful because it only took 4 hours and helped me figure out a lot of shape carving techniques to create depth. I used a lot of the tonal techniques I had learned doing my rough pen portraits and I think this helped a bit but I do think I made Akram look a bit like a ventriloquist dummy…

Week 2

This week I painted acclaimed writer Bernardine Evaristo, I really enjoyed this painting as I took a more illustrative approach, and rather than going for likeness and realism I tried to focus on mark-making and lighting to establish depth but also a sense of personality and warmth. I think I managed to achieve a good likeness despite the painting being more impressionistic.

 

 

Week 3

This week I painted famous photographer Rankin, I wanted to attempt a more realistic render but again I had the issue of a bad reference image, I wanted to continue playing with mark-making and to ensure I achieved a more realistic likeness I spent a lot longer on the drawing process.

I think planning was a very important factor when it came to establishing the likeness and although previously I would have stopped with my initial sketch, I took the time to correct proportional mistakes and add marks that suggested tone, some areas of this painting are not accurate to the reference but detailed from my imagination as I felt it might look a bit plain if I painted exactly what I saw, I think this is one of my best paintings and I used composition as a tool to illustrate that he is a photographer, framing him with paint that was applied very thickly with a pallet knife.

 

Week 5

I missed week 4 as I was working on something else that I will go into in one of my next blog post, but for week 5 I tried to paint will young, This week I really struggled with likeness and proportions, I stopped after 4 hours as I didn’t feel like it was going anywhere. There are areas of the face that I really like and really think work, the left side of the face is really good in my opinion, but I think that the proportions and right side really let it down. I was painting with oils so I reached a point where it was overworked and I couldn’t go over it until it dried, I ended up frisbeeing it out of my window and into my garden to the tune of “leave right now”, but then I realized I hadn’t photographed it so that’s why there’s dirt in the paint. I’m not happy with the outcome at all but I did learn a lot as this was one of the first times I under painted with acrylics. Obviously, I was not happy that I didn’t have a nice painting at the end of the session but ultimately I’m glad I put my time into it as when I have the least confidence, I tend to perform the best.