I’m taking a life painting class this term, and they’re still trying to teach us how to paint in general, so we’re going back to the basics with classic techniques. We’re supposed to be using oils for this class, but I talked to the instructor and got permission to use acrylics throughout. I seriously hate oils and will never use them voluntarily. But also it makes more sense to me to continue developing in one medium, especially one I’m more likely to use some day.
The first assignment we had was just to paint a plaster cast. I found one of a “young British woman” on Amazon and did that one. We had to paint a wash of ivory black for the background. Here’s the final result I came up with for that one:
I think it’s decent, but the instructor pointed out that my brush strokes could be smoother, which is true. I still struggle with the brush.
The next week, we were learning the heightening with white technique. This is kind of interesting and makes total sense in theory, but my execution wasn’t great. Although we really weren’t supposed to for the assignment (we were just supposed to use white gesso on another ivory black wash background), I went over her hair in black because it was so dark. Here’s that one:
I learned after getting feedback that this technique works best when there is more extreme contrast, and this is a copy of Renoir’s In Summer, which has mostly middle values in the area I focused on. So it makes sense that it was hard to do. My instructor also suggested I try to make the background smoother, with the brush strokes less visible. But I’ve realized I actually like the background in all of these. I mean, it does mean that the subject is sort of floating in midair, but I guess for these, it doesn’t bother me.
The next assignment also had a heightening with white step, but then we were supposed to go over it with grayscale glazes. I used one of the images in our model library. This one got really messed up when I was painting on the background wash (the area around her face and to the left lifted up so it was much lighter than the rest), and I tried to fix it with only partial success. Here’s the heightened-with-white step (apologies for the yellow light):
And here’s the final version with the glazes. I am still really struggling to learn glazing, since I can never seem to get the amount of medium right. But here it is:
I think this turned out not bad. I felt a little more comfortable with the glazing, but I’m not all the way there yet. It looks a little better without the glare, too—I really need to figure out how to get good pictures of my acrylic pieces.