Alla Prima costume sessions

Every Thursday night Julie, Mark, Spyder, and I host a reserved studio life drawing session. The sessions are three hours long and involve a costumed model. For photos of the sessions and examples of the attending artists' work visit the Seattle Illustrator's Collective Blog.

Recently I've been focusing on painting portraits of our models. Makeup and head gear has made this extremely fun and interesting. Due to the short time available (2hrs 20min after breaks and gesture warm ups), I am painting very small portraits. The panels are around 5"x5". Painting this small also makes me concentrate on the largest shapes with very few details. I am gradually increasing the size of the panels as I become more comfortable with this process.

The painting above was of a Butoh inspired costume. I first applied a texture to the gessoed panel by applying a tone mixed from alizarin crimson and sap green. I then dipped my brush in my jar of dirty turpenoid and allowed a liberal amount of turps to drip down the panel. I like the warm tone and 'drippy' texture this created. I then drew the large shapes using the mixture of alizarin crimson and sap green. Next I applied a dark wash of the red/green mixture to the shadows. I added some ivory black to the mixture for the darkest darks. Ivory black is a blue-black which makes it useful for the cool areas of shadow. The light side is just the dark mixtures lightened with titanium white.



Above is a portrait of my wife in a zombie costume. I played with the texture some more to make the drips more visible. By applying a darker wash initially and really going crazy with the turps I was able to get a higher contrast with the drips. The painting process was the same except that I didn't use ivory black because I wanted to keep the shadows warm. The most common drawing error I make with portraits is misjudging the distance between the eyes and the tip of the nose. I found a hint from Richard Schmid very helpful. He says to use the shorter distances from the corner of the eye to the edge of the eye socket to the top of the nostril to the edge of the shadow on the bulb of the nose to the connection of the septum with the philtrum. I heard this hint after painting this portrait and you can see that I elongated the distance between the eyes and shadow under the nose. oops.

Above is a painting of an elven archer. This was an amazing costume and a blast to paint. I used the same techniques as I did with the zombie girl. The models face was long so the distance between eyes and nose shadow is more accurate but still too exaggerated. I think I should have used ivory black in this one and I always have trouble with the transition into shadow on the partially lit cheek. I'll have to figure out what I'm doing wrong.

The last few I've done are showing some progress. I'll post them soon.

Till next time...