the figure

The last sev­eral weeks, I’ve attended a local fig­ure drawing/painting ses­sion in which there is only one pose for the full time. The last cou­ple of times I’ve attended, I’ve done oil portraits.

The por­trait from the first week was pretty awful. Last night’s was not exactly good, but not nearly as bad. Maybe I’ll post them when I have some­thing a lit­tle bet­ter to com­pare them to.

This is the first work I’ve done with por­traits or fig­ures in about three years, so I am not sur­prised that some of my skills have got­ten rusty. One skill that has improved, how­ever, is mix­ing flesh tones. I remem­ber, when I was tak­ing fig­ure paint­ing classes, hav­ing a heck of a time get­ting flesh tones that looked even approx­i­mately con­vinc­ing, even when I could take my time over a multi-session pose of 9 or 12 hours. The poses I’ve been work­ing from lately are only 2.5 hours, but I now find paint mix­ing to be rel­a­tively straightforward.

Because these are pretty short poses, I have not wor­ried too much about get­ting exactly the right hue, instead choos­ing to con­cen­trate of value, chroma, and shape. I’m work­ing with a very lim­ited palette in which flesh tones are mixed from lead white, raw sienna, burnt sienna, and raw umber. (I’ve also used some black and some ultra­ma­rine for dark hair and back­ground.) The flesh tones are basi­cally con­vinc­ing, how­ever: oth­ers at the ses­sion have remarked on it and my wife, who remem­bers my pre­vi­ous strug­gles, has men­tioned that these flesh tones seem bet­ter. I should note that, thus far, the sub­jects have been Cau­casian, although I don’t think I would have any greater trou­ble paint­ing folks of less pallor.

I’m not sure why this aspect of paint­ing has become eas­ier, except for all the prac­tice I’ve put in mix­ing still life col­ors over the last cou­ple of years. The very sim­ple palette seems to help as well.

Now if I can just get the shape of the head down cor­rectly in paint, I’ll be just fine.

Update

7 May 2009: On fur­ther reflec­tion, I think that one of the things I’ve learned over the last cou­ple of years, even with a very lim­ited palette, is much bet­ter con­trol over chroma. Many artists mix overly intense skin tones. Most people’s skin is very low in chroma. Even when using rel­a­tively dull earth col­ors, you often need to cut the chroma of your mixes to get accu­rate color. For these por­trait stud­ies, I’ve been using raw umber for that pur­pose, as it’s chroma is very, very low.