Walk-through - Live Portrait Painting in Oil

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Original art by @jnart
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Stephen Bauman is a real master at realistic natural painting. He is teacher at Florence Art Academy in Mölndal Sweden. I hade the chance to attend one of his short 4 day intensive workshops. This is a brief walk-through when I did my portrait and some good tips. I hope you can learn something and get inspired to explore more.

All the elements we spoke of are the following. You find much better teachers elsewhere on the internet but you should really check them out if you want to progress as an natural painter.

• Color-values: The relative degree of lightness or darkness of a particular color mixture.

• Line/edge quality: The relative darkness, lightness, hardness, or softness of a contour or shadow edge.

• Edge: The place where two pieces of paint meet. Edges are simplified into three types, hard, soft, and lost.

• Form: THe visible volume or configuration of a subject. The specific roundness of an object for instance the human body expression by its surface and anatomy.

• Naturalistic: Created to replicate what is observed in nature. Derived from personal observation of nature, and attempting to convey it very accurately.

• Turning the form: Arranging the values in a painting or drawing so as to express the roundness of a subject.

• Grisaille: The method we used in the beginning - painting in black, white, and raw umber.

• Monochromatic: Containing or using only one color (as in an underpainting when only using raw umber).

• Unity of light (shadow): The clear separation between light and shadow. This separation can be observed when squinting while looking at a subject, or glancing at it in a black mirror.

• Key: The interpreted relationships of values, in a drawing or painting, taken from observing the whole subject/picture plane.

• Visual impression: The fall of light on a subject which can be well observed while squinting.

• Gesture: The movement of the figure or form. A change in direction that can be conveyed through curves and angles. A straight line alone has no inherent gesture. Two connected lines going in different directions have a gesture. A curve represents this. The greater the arc and the bigger the change in direction the stronger the gesture. This can be represented using three lines, a straight, C curve, and an S curve.

• Design: The interpretation of the underlying structure of nature as expressed through line and shape, something we consider constantly while constructing a drawing/painting.

• Light effect: Created by an appropriate contrast relationship between light and dark values in a drawing/ painting.

• Chroma: Purity or intensity of color.

• Hue: The identity of a color in the spectrum or color wheel.

• Structural symmetry: Where the forms of the body, particularly the head and torso are the same on both sides, when split down the middle. For example the features of the face line up on a horizontal access, and are the same distance from the center of the face. If you were to put a line down the center, one side should mirror the other. Structural symmetry becomes more complicated as when the object turns the symmetry exists in the perspective. Structural Symmetry is the tracking and arranging according to the symmetry and perspective of the object.
  

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  Enough with text, here comes the process:

  1 - Set up you stuff, study your subject.

  

  2 - Block in the overall structure in charcoal.

  

  3 - Block in the overall structure in Grisaille

  

  

  

  4 - Paint the background for a better overall view of the picture.

  

  5 - Mix flesh tones and dig in :)

  

  

  6 - Establish shadow, mid tones and highlights. All the time try to get the proportions right.

  

  

  

  

  

  7 - Keep on working and think of the face as an head - it is almost a ball-shape, round of the edges!

  

  8 - Work your way from overall structure and color to finer and finer details.

  

  

  9 - Finished. I can see lots of error when I watch the final painting and compare with the subject, but consider this was one of my first oil paintings and the model was set 5 meters away so I could not see any details

  

  My pallet:

  

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  And please take a look at my Steemit introduction post below! :)
  

  
  Have a great day!

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