|
Hi Jimmie,
This is really good for a very first attempt at oils. It is a learning process. It is like learning to ride a bike - first you learn to keep your balance and to steer, and then you enjoy the ride and don't worry that you're not ready yet for the Tour de France.
One insight I was told helped me to understand the difference in approach between oil painting and some other media. Pencil, watercolor, pen and ink, and particularly tattooing, are additive processes - you are building up from the blank ground, adding and adding more and more as the work progresses. Oil painting, at least in wet-into-wet painting, is much more a process of successive approximations. You begin by putting in large areas of light and shadow in their average values. Then you divide and subdivide into smaller and smaller areas to show the variations in value or color, blending in the transitions. At the beginning you concentrate on getting the proportions right, and the details will emerge as you work into smaller areas. This way you are much less likely to get a finished eye that you decide needs to be moved a quarter inch.
|