In my recent self portrait workshop it was a joy to work with other painters. It is always hard for me when the class is over I miss the students and the bonding we experience together at the workshops. Self portraiture is an excellent way to get into or improve your portrait painting by gaining a deeper understanding of the Human Face. See workshops.
I wanted to mention a few leanings I have gained by giving workshops for many years.
Treat your painting as you would create some fine cooking. You would not just grab haphazardly any spices and ingredients and throw them into a bowl hoping for some great flavor to emerge. I believe you would carefully select the ingredients, proportions of ingredients, application and maybe even time of insertion into your final creation and then time them just right.
Savory flavors in cooking are about contrasting flavor ingredients. In painting, everything is about the proper selection and its contrast to what is next to it. Contrasting brush stroke ingredients ( example: color, value, shape, size, texture, flow, thickness) add flavor to your painting.
Icing a cake, is probably more like painting then drawing with a pencil. Though I find a lot of painters want to carefully render and draw in each item perfectly, I enjoy a more painterly approach, maybe like even Sargent would have enjoyed, where each stroke is carefully designed and then placed on the canvas. It starts on the canvas and ends on the canvas. And you need to go back for more icing with every placement or two of icing (paint).
broken mirror self portrait 07-03-2011, oil on canvas panel, created with knife painting
The above demonstration was completed in a few hours at my last workshop. Developed after prior initial studies of form and structure. It was using a limited palette to concentrate on values, lighting and form. Using a painting knife kept me from niggling details and helped me go for the overall painting impression while adding a unique characteristic to the paint. I enjoy painting knives, but they are not for everyone. There are no limits though to personal expression in self portraiture as illustrated in the movie presentation we enjoyed viewing together.
The broken mirror happened in transport of the mirror (good thing I am not superstitious) and added some activity to the lower left corner by duplicating and enlarging a repeated section of the painting.
© 2011 Daryl Urig
