Finaly! This is the finished version of the portrait of Anne Holiday. It was a finalist in the 2010 Adam's Portraiture Award. A somewhat dubious honour.
I wanted to try a monoprint using the slow dryng Open Acrylics. I used a rectangle of white perspex as my plate. Being white this made it easier to see what I was doing. I spent quite a while working on the plate, probably as long as I would on a regular painting. Regular acrylics would not allow you to do this as they dry too quickly. Here is the image I pulled off it, printing on a small ethching press. The image is of course reversed. I wasn't too happy with it really. I thought it looked better o the perspex plate! However, regarding it as a learning process I perservered. There is usually a ghost of the image left on the plate after printing, so I reworked the image more loosely this time and produced the two further prints below. They are a bit more lively, but I still wasn't happy with them. I was wiping the plate clean when I thought I'd give it one more chance. I like this one the best of the lot.
Dale Copeland oil on aluminium 100x100mm This is my partner Dale. She is an assemblage artist, website writer, mathematician, teacher and a long time friend, and mother to our daughter, Toby. She doesn't approve of social media sites. Despite this, she gets far more likes and attention than I could ever hope for. When she learned I was painting my Facebook friends she immediately changed her profile picture to this one. I was tempted to paint the old one, but I'm happy with the way this one came out.
Another session yesterday. I started by applying some thin glazes on the left side of Anne's face trying to add a bit of depth to the shadow areas. Then I worked into that, using slightly more impasto paint. Last week I was struggling so much in bad lighting conditions that I turned on an electric light to give a bit more ambient light to her right side, and I quite like it so we've decided to keep it. I've added cadmium orange to my palette. It is a strangely cool orange that I've never been able to duplicate using cadmium yellow and red and as a tint with lots of white it makes a good colour for flesh lit by electric light. The same goes for alizarian crimson or rose madder tints. The left side of her face is picking up the natural light from the windows on that side and I'm using terre vert, raw umber, mars violet and ivory black. I was still not happy about something and I came to the conclusion I had the eyes too close together. Much to Anne's const
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