The Portrait Society of America 43adhesion for the subsequent layers to come.
Now that my painting is dry, it’s pretty easy for
me to slowly work into building up the drawing
and the features more specifically. Because
I had this sort of blurry blob of form to work
from, I have a place to begin my refinement.
I find this works a lot better for me than
jumping to this stage at the beginning. I find
this stage more like sculpting.
S TAG E 7: I’ve committed to the face and spent
the most time on it because it is the focus of
my painting. I am slowly easing into finding
difficult and subtle passages of the painting,
like the neck, now that I have a lot more
information to go on. My plan is to work this
way only in areas I really want to show. I don’t
want to cover some of my fun and fresh marks
from that first stage!
STAGE 8 - FINAL STAGE
Personal Restart, oil on panel,
26 x 20" (66 x 51 cm).
As you can see, I went into the background with
both my palette knife and a brush, adding the
floral print into the values I had. There are a lot
of areas that are still from that first initial layer.
I like to think of a painting as being this journal
of time—you can see all the different layers
down to that first layer that was so visceral and
emotive. To me, painting is just as much about
leaving areas out as it is about refinement—
both are tricky and take practice.
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