Study for portrait of Sean P.
 

This is a study in preparation for a full size portrait. 24" x 18" on canvas board.

Close-up.

Just a quick note, Deladier, realizing that this is a "study". The eyes appear to me to be coming in at markedly different elevations. (A line from the bottom of the eye on our right, perpendicular to the vertical axis of the face, misses the other eye by a full eye's height.)

Thanks for pointing that out, Steve. I wouldn't have caught it as I've been working furiously on this in an attempt to finish it by tomorrow. It is a quick study (6 hours so far), but even a study worth doing is worth doing right. So I'll correct it now.

Dear Deladier,

After your last piece, I am so much looking forward to seeing this one unfold. At this point I can only suggest two things:

1.Be vigilant about the degree of difference between the values in the light and shadow sides of your model's face, as well as the relative temperatures in light and shadow. Your photograph will falsely represent the darks as too dark.

2. Take at least as many process photos to share.

Kindest regards,

p.s. I think you should get that clock out of your studio, and your brain. Beyond all, remember that the race goes not always to the swift. Whatever time it takes, it just takes.

As always, I like to see the reference before critiquing a painting. Can you post it?

Just from what I can see so far, though, you might want to check the drawing here and there (eyes, as Steven mentions, and the direction the nose is pointing, etc.) Also there seem to be some very saturated slashes on the right cheek (from our point of view).

As Chris points out, painting is not a race. If you're timing yourself in order to keep your work looking spontaneous here's another possible way to approach that. John Singer Sargent was known to hold his brush in mid-air for a very long time, looking and thinking. Then he would place his strokes confidently.

The slow planning and the quick, deft brushstrokes are, I think, what gives his work the freshness it has, but also allows it to be perfectly accurate. (And, of course, we don't know how many brush-strokes he wiped off, or how many layers of paint there are underneath, until he got it right!)

Sargent Redux
 

Deladier,

I too enjoyed your last post.

Re: the method of Sargent, I am no expert, but a book I do have said he would scrape out a head as many as 9 times. One lady posed for 6 weeks and he tore up the canvas and started again with a new one. The lady in question broke down in tears.

As to your study, the neck, on our left, seems too wide from the ear to the jaw. It also looks too far behind the ear.

Nice start though.

Sincerely,

Reflected light
 

Hi Deladier,

Your painting technique has a lot of life to it. I can learn a lot by just looking at your study.

I am wondering if the reflected light on the subject's right ear and nostril are too light. Both the ear and nostril are in shadow, and I've seen discussion on this Forum about the lightest part of the shadow not being too light.

I'm learning myself, so I would love to hear any discussion on this.

Joan

Time
 

Deladier, I'm also curious about your obsession with time. Please don't beat yourself up again on this one, it was painful last time!

I see the same problems as others with the eye and nose. Also the intense color may be distracting. I look forward to seeing this one progress.

Jean

Update
 

Jean, thank you for your concern. It was not my intention to cause you pain. What you aptly called obsession is in fact a reflection of my state of mind. I intend, however, to continue in this vein for the time being as it is working for me.

Source image

Close

Hi, Deladier,

Terrific likeness, right off the bat. Your source photo, I think,is simultaneously excellent and problematic.

Your source has good detail in both light and shadow, and I can see that you have stepped back a bit from the artificial darks in the shadow (if it were my portrait, I'd probably step back one-two more F-stops or so). But I think your photo is failing to give reasonable information with respect to color temperature, and you are the only one who can control this in your painting. It looks to me like you lighted your subject with a close incandescent or Tungsten light, (very warm in temperature); if this is the case, you would want to cool off the color temperatures inthe shadows. Given the proximity of the light source and the distinction fo the cast shadows, it would be much more difficult to convince your viewer that the light source is cool.

See ya tomorrow,

Hi, Chris. The subject was lit by direct and indirect sunlight only. Mid-afternoon sun in Southern California with the warm sunlight and the pale blue sky to fill.

In this study I have focused my attentions on the modeling of the figure and the formal composition. I didn't think much about color and detail because that would take too long for a study.

Hey, you want me to throw away my clock? I just bought it! It works great...I got the atomic thing with the thermometer, and .....it's got Celsius, Fahrenheit and even Kelvin! Well, maybe not Kelvin...anyway, I think you should get one too. 20 bucks ;)

Given the angle of your cast shadows, I think you are still in the same Kelvin range as you'd face with incandescent lighting. Your studies (small sample to be sure) are as finished as many others' completed works. If the study serves the function of a playspace to work out decisions for the final, then you might want to play around with your temperatures a bit.

You have a lively and interesting background started, and whatever you decide to so with temperature should follow through in the background too.

I live in a house filled with my husband's collection of atomic, antique and various other clocks; anyone else visiting could probably barely stand the noise but I never hear the chimes (unless, of course, I am lying awake at 3 am thinking about some silly thing or another - or worse, what the heck time it IS - then they are LOUD). Anyway, you can rid of those troublesome things on E-Bay. With my luck, Ron will end up buying them.

Having the reference photo here leads me to add a suggestion or two about the eyes, upon which I

Deladier,

About the eyes...

In my opinion there is a false illusion being formed between the subject's right eye and the well pointed light striking this eye.

This beam of light (striking the eye more directly than on the lit side of the face) has illuminated the iris and worked its way up under the pupil. I think it has also cut away some of the pupil on the under side. This has caused the pupil to read as if it were looking up. I think you will just have to override what you see.

Of course there are some people whose eyes don't work in complete concert. If this is the case, my apologies.

Nice photo image, I appreciate the thought that went into its compostion and execution.

That is exactly what is going on there. The light, working its way around his right iris, bounces back from the lens and partly obfuscates the lower perimeter of the pupil, making it look higher than his left pupil.

You'll notice that I took some liberties with the drawing of the irises. I was interested in trying expressive methods of rendering those translucent tissues. The overall formal relationships is given less importance as the objective of this study is to practice the treatment of passages without commitment.

It amazes me how much our Forum dwellers can perceive and infer from these bleached little images on the screen!

Edit
 

Part of what we all must do is leave stuff out. The little light the left of his mouth I'd reduce in importance. The background really must be subdued some too. Try painting it as best you with a number 14 filbert alla prima in 2 hours...that should do it. Simplify and unify.

Update.

Close.

Deladier,

The only observation I might make to this very beautiful piece is along the lines of color temperature. Both the lit and shadowed sides of the face are hot. Given the light source you are dealing with, you might think about cooling the shadowed side of the face (and all other shadows, of course) with greens, violets or blues.

If this was my painting, I'd probably cool with green-blues, in the same value as you now have in place.

Nice work.

To me the lit side of the face looks "cool" and the shadowed side looks "warm". They are both red/pink, but the lit side is cool pink and the shadows are warm red.
I always thought that red, like green, can be either warm or cool.

The shadow knows
 

I think the problem is the discrepancy between the different shadow areas. Whatever is influencing the shadow side of the face obviously is having no bearing on the shadows of the shirt. All shadows need to be consistent, color influence and temperature wise, or the painting looses unity. The same holds true for the lights.

You both gained and lost ground on the eyes. Consider:

1) In the photo, I don't see any of the whites of the eyes -- in either eye -- on our left side of the eyes. Yet I see a crescent of white alongside the iris in both the eyes in the painting, and it's pulling toward us a part of the eye that should be receding and saying "round".

2) The whites of the eyes that we can and should see, on our right, are too white. (Yeah, in the photo, too. Forget the photo.) Gray them down a bit, again to help round out the form. The bright, colorful irises should be closest to us.

3) The pupils are so small as to suggest the influence of some bright light behind the photographer. If this subject's pupils are in fact naturally small, all the time, then fine, that's a characterizing quality. But the tiny pupils are part of what's making the two eyes focus on markedly different points. Enlarge them just a bit and the effect is substantial. (They won't be quite so laser-beamed at small targets.)

4) The iris of the eye on our right has become oblong, rather than round.

Consider wiping out that eye on our right completely, and putting it in again. (I was once told to do that, and I protested that I'd never get the eye "right" again. The instructor was incredulous (it was the first time I'd seen him do a double-take, as if he couldn't believe what he'd just heard). "You'll have to," he said. And that was that. And I did.

And again, Squint! at the photo (as you would at the subject if this were from life). If you can't see a value when you squint, it likely doesn't even need to be in your painting. Otherwise, you're going to be overmodeling, or looking for lights within shadow areas.

The toughest thing...
 

It is one of the toughest things, to get the right shadow colors from photos. Painting from life, it is remarkably easy in comparison. Shadows must NOT be intense re: chroma. As mentioned by others you have hints to go by in the photo. The white shirt will help you to read the color of light and then you can extrapolate to find the temperatures of the shadows (to some degree).

The problem is that cameras don't read shadows very well. If you were working from life you could squint at the ACTUAL subject and compare your subject to your painting and the answer would come to you quite naturally. Can you get him to sit again? Adjust this from life if you can.

Deladier, I love watching your portraits build, and am not sure if anyone has asked you, but I finally put my finger on it, have you ever studied with John Howard Sanden? They remind me of his.

Beautiful work.

Done
 

Here is the final on this study.

My goal in this piece was to get a run through all the passages I will be rendering in the final painting, as well as experimenting with the light without commitment to exactness.

My intention was actually to have stopped sooner than this but your comments encouraged me to refine it further and that was great. It was an excellent exercise and I now feel much more confident and ready to proceed with the real thing.

Thank you all who took time to offer me those critical comments and suggestions.

Bravo for making time a consideration! Time is the dictator of style, and if you set no limits on it, you run the risk of wasting it. Great stylish work, even if the proportions are a bit weak.

Thank you, Lon.

"Time is the dictator of style"?
 

Gee and I thought it was the artist.

The only useful references to time about art, as far as I can see are, not enough time, timeless and forgotton by time. The latter I am afraid is a fate many of us will share. I have seen artwork that has taken a year to do, would it be any less exquisite because of the care the painter put into it. I don't think Vermeer, Botticelli, Ingres, Velasquez, Da Vinci, Goya, Rubens, Rembrant, Michealangelo to name a few, put a timer up to judge their accomplishments. I doubt that they just whipped them out. It looks like they savoured and delighted in the process of painting them.

Beginners often mistake speed for mastery. It is instead, the artist's total conciousness in every stroke, fast or slow that makes a work of art, not simply facile brushwork.

Sincerely,

I was reading something Virgil Elliot wrote on another website a while back about Sargent's work. Apparently Sargent labored mightily to give the appearance that many of his paintings were dashed out with great speed and agility. The "spontaneous" brushwork was a deliberate and contrived effect.

I love the fresh look that resulted, but now I know that those paintings didn't spring forth fully formed and perfect all at once, but rather were the result of much contemplation, planning and rework.

Michele, in the lovely book I have on Sargent, one of his subjects talks of how he would start over at least 5 times!

Sharon, I think people should be careful not to mistake this for enthusiasm. I know I am guilty of zipping along, my family questions if we will ever eat again, but I certainly don

Society of Western Artists
 

This piece got first place in the category "Oils" at the Society of Western Artists' show which just took place in Fresno, California.

Congratulations! Very well deserved.

Congratulations, Deladier - what can you tell us about the competition?

Hello, Chris.

There was a large number of pieces on display (maybe 60 or 70). Some were quite impressive and many were competently executed.

The Best of Show was justly awarded to a beautifully accomplished watercolor landscape. There weren't many portraits in the show, although most of the paintings on display seemed to be competing in the "Oils" category (at least 3 out of 5, it seemed to me).

Portraits seem to have an advantage when placed side by side with equally accomplished works of art. They speak to the viewer.