Portrait Comissions, Study Process and Painting Composition

In today's entry I will provide a little bit of insight into the process I follow when creating a piece of art, whether it is one of my Amsterdam portrait commissions, or just an original work.  Many of these techniques are discussed during my drawing lessons and painting classes, though most of what I will touch on in this post is discussed once the student has a grip on the basics and wants to start creating his or her own pieces.

The process begins with a photograph.  In the case of this painting, I found a lady sitting on a cafe corner with back light and a very interesting pose, so I made a photo of her and promised not to share it with the world.  This is the photo as originally taken, and I've blurred the face. You'll probably see it in the drawing, but I do have some integrity!

Because the taking of the photo was a bit of a difficult negotiation, I did my best to frame and shoot, while capturing the features as best as I could, given that the rest of the drawing would be fairly simple to figure out even in poor light.

The first step in creating the portrait is to decide how it will be framed.  For this I decide to use the 'rule of thirds' principle of composition where you divide the rectangular space of the painting in three equal sections both horizontally and vertically and place important features on the dividing lines.  You can see this more clearly  when I show you the cropped result with overlapping markers:

Notice how the horizontal 3rds have been neatly divided among the very dark bottom, a middle value mid section, and the back-lit top.

There are other compositional advantages that I decided to exploit as well, and which were not totally planned.  There is a strong horizontal line, as well as a scarf, which both lead the eye towards the face. Both the face and the hands are intersected by the main diagonal.  One thing I did 'plan' or noticed and which made the picture good, is that I should be able to achieve a 'mood' in this picture due to the donwcast expression, which is complimented by the back light and the fact that most dark values are grouped at the bottom.

Another happy coincidence is that my hardest edge can be easily foudn in the forehead against the back light.

Now it's time to do a quick gestural sketch to capture the pose and get a feel for it.

The purpose of a gestural sketch is to begin assessing the pose you're dealing with.  In this cake I wanted to make sure I captured that slouchy lost-in-thought gesture, and see if the composition I had framed in the photo worked well when translated to paper.

Gestural sketches can help us created an exaggerated version of the pose and here's where we take artistic license.  These sketches prevent our drawing from taking on a feel that is too stiff and sculptural.  They are a lot of fun and they can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes depending on how much detail we want to capture.

You will notice that the drawing is very rough and I was not too concerned with the facial features other than marking them in and making sure that the angle of the forehead to the chin was correct to capture the gesture of the head as a whole.

The next step is to make a more detailed study of the face.  I'm doing this to prevent my end product to look to overworked, so that my sketching can be cleaner and more direct.  It also prevents my paper from becoming worn out or irritated through too much erasing.  I never trace faces, it's important to learn how to draw them just like everything else.  This is something I'm very clear about during my Amsterdam drawing classes, and I emphasize it in the portrait commissions I create.

The expression of the face in this sketch will be crucial to make the artwork communicate the feeling I want it to.

Here you see the portrait study drawing in pencil.  It's not a perfect rendition but the line drawing is exactly what it should be.  I say the rendition is not perfect, because first I have not spent enough time sorting out the value relationships and making this a proper drawing, and secondly, the values in this face do not correspond to the values I will use in the end result.  You see for example lots of 'total white' on the face, while the final face will have 'lights' that are far darker than this.  There will be no highlights on it and even the little rim light reflection on the forehead and nose will not be the lightest notes on the drawing/painting.

After I finish this portrait sketch, I trace some line markers that will help me draw the face in the next step of the process. 

You will notice that the sketch drawing has a couple of little squares at the top right.  A couple of words about what those are:

These are called thumbnails and they are a fantastic way to test the composition of your painting while including the tones you intend to use.  The tonal structure of a painting is like it's skeleton.  A painting can be both abstract or very realistic, but it needs to have an interesting tonal structure and composition if it is to succeed.  Contrary to what most people think, color is not what makes a painting great.  Color is the icing on the cake. The cake itself is made of a good tonal structure.

Sometimes you must create quite a few different thumbnails to play around with the tones and find a winning combination.  In this case I felt the picture was already telling me what to do and only a few decisions were left.  I created the first thumbnail and it felt right.  The mood was there and the only real decision I'm faced with is just how light will I make those back lights.  Will I go to total white or will I tone it down and make it more gloomy  and dramatic?

Notice that even though the scarf and the face in the photo have lots of values, I'm trying to compress these and make a more uniform block of the whole area.  I have expressed  these uniform blocks of tone in the numbers thumbnail beneath.  This is a toning-by-numbers reminder I'm giving myself.

This is one of the great uses of the thumbnail.  It allows you to depart from the original in an attempt to achieve a stronger composition. You determine value ranges that you're allowed to use in every area of the painting and try to stick to those as much as possible.  In doing that you exercise value economy, sending a much clearer message to the viewer.

At this point you may be thinking this is all overkill.  That it is mental to go though all this trouble just to create a portrait commission.  But all this is indeed what separates an excellent result from a mediocre one.  The masterpieces we admire in museums are not the result of blind luck.  These painters plotted and schemed for weeks, sometimes months, to create amazing pieces of visual art.  No element left to chance: composition, light, subject, brushwork.  Da Vinci apparently spent weeks scouring Venice to find the face that would be the right Judas in the Last Supper.

I used to look at all these steps, studies, etc by other painters and think to myself, "what a drag, I just want to paint and make nice art".  However, as you begin to get more ambitious about the results you want, you realize the process must be broken down in stages.  You have to plan ahead, creep up to the painting.

In any case, we're now ready for the next step, which is to make a fully fledged  study in charcoal, on A2 format.  This begins with the usual line block in, which is the stage I'm currently at in this drawing, and that you can see here:

You may think: "all that work just for this??"   Well, yes.  It doesn't look impressive, but remember all I've learned about this piece before getting to this stage:

- I know how I want to frame the image
- I'm making use of strong compositional principles
- I've created the face drawing in 5 minutes with my paper intact
- I'm clear about the value structure I want to use

In a way, at this stage I have my work cut out for me, which allows me to spend all my mental energy thinking of the technique I will use for laying down the tone, in view of the end result I want.

Hope this helps anyone who's curious about how to start a portrait drawing or painting and wants a result that is better than average.  I will continue to work on this piece and post the progress as I go along.  The plan is to finish the charcoal study and then perhaps create a color study in pastel, before finally creating an oil master.

Drawing Lessons Amsterdam, The Use of Skin Tones

During my drawing lessons in Amsterdam, students who want to start painting are usually attracted to either making still life works or portraits.

Portraits pose a challenge that has kept artists of all strides interested in that aspect of the arts for as long as we can trace history.  The first challenge is posed by the drawing itself, but even if you achieve this with dexterity, if you're aim is to make a portrait in color, flesh tones are the next challenge.

In this post I try to provide a few pointers in dealing with flesh tones, which should help you get around this very typical problem.  As with all my posts, I recommend you keep these as suggestions, and that you try to practice as much as possible from life, which is in the end, the only thing that will make your art get to the next level.

So here are my tips:

Tip No 1: Brown, pink and yellow are not to be abused

A common mistake is to simplify skin tones into their cartoonish versions and go for the flat single color look that people are 'supposed' to be.  This is a widespread mistake with all painting where our mental concepts of an object take precedence over our visual input, but nowhere does it become more painfully obvious than in a portrait.  In a way, learning to paint is learning to un-learn what we think and give precedence to what we actually see. 

What you see in real life is that the color of skin, like the color of everything else is determined by 3 aspects:

- Local color, in this case the brown, pink and yellow
- Direct light
- Reflected light or reflected colors

Using pre-mixed 'skin' colors and lack of observational knowledge usually results in the abuse of the use of local color at the expense of the other two.  The result is a portrait that appears as if airbrushed with fake tan:

Tip No 2: When possible work from life

As I explain on a separate post, working from life is superior to working from picture references for several reasons, not least of which is your ability to perceive colors, which is at least at the moment, superior to that of a camera capturing them, and a monitor relaying them to you.

Technology adds steps and limitations that get in the way and fall short of the way a human would perceive a scene.  Colors are lost, tones and values compressed and the result in general less than ideal.

If you must work from photos, make sure that you practice working from life so that you know what to look for and how to correct for the downsides of photography.  Many artists offering portraits on commission work from photo and do it very well, but the good ones work mostly from life


Tip No 3: Beware of your chroma (saturation)

Skin is a subtle thing and painting it right can be a challenge.  However, if your aim is to paint realist portraits and nudes it's probably better to err toward the side of a low color saturation, instead of a high one. 

During my Amsterdam painting classes, I invite my students to look at the work of the old masters, and what you inevitably notice is subtle tones of off-gray color, as opposed to strong pinks, browns or yellows.  I once heard of an artist that like to create a 'symphony of grays', and that should be a good thing to keep in mind. 

This is not to say you can use strong color, but know when and where to be vibrant and your painting will sing.  Do it all the time and it will just scream mindlessly.   The real painting master learns to navigate an ever narrower band of color and value.  This takes knowledge of color mixing, discipline and dexterity in applying it.  Even if you don't achieve the level of a Rembrandt, it is working towards it that counts.

A good principle when learning to draw and paint is to do things in a way that your lacks and mistakes are exposed, not hidden.  That's what brings about learning and improvement!



Tip No 4: Decide the finish you're chasing after

When you make a portrait, it is good to start with a strong idea of the type of outcome you are looking for.  You don't need to have every bit totally planned out, but if we talk about skin you should be clear on the type of finish and brushwork you'll be using.

This is particularly important for skin colors on a portrait painting, because skin in real life has a translucent quality. 

You should decide whether you'll try to replicate this with a layered (glazed) painting or go for thicker layers and focus on the texture qualities of the medium.  Decisions, decisions, decisions. No painting can accommodate all your ideas, and the best ones are the ones with a clear purpose.

Deciding this will improve the way you apply your skin tones and in turn the end result.

Portrait commissions in Amsterdam, Tips for Working from Photos

As you can tell by the title of this latest post, I decided to feed lord Google a bit more content about my portrait commissions in Amsterdam.

There, now that I've used the keyword, I will tell you about a nice little portrait I made while playing around with some pastels. In doing so I will touch upon some of the topics that I discuss during my Amsterdam painting lessons, regarding color temperature, working from life versus working from pictures and impressionistic color.  Mostly, however,  I will try to discuss my process when working from photo, and things I do to try and obtain a better overall result.

I will use some high res images to illustrate this point and hope that this helps you relate to my color examples.

Here is an original photo that I took from my nephew Luke Patrick while he was toying around with his food during breakfast:

So lets discuss some of the things I try to do when making a photo for a later portrait commission or my own projects. 

Here are some tips:

Tip # 1: I know this is a tall order, but learn about portraiture

Obvious poses, people smiling while looking at the camera and that sort of thing makes for a tacky result.  An artistic portrait captures who the person is, while if you take a snapshot of the person smiling, it looks somehow timebound. Muscles in the face don't maintain an authentic smile for too long so a big smiling portrait looks unnatural and too photo-like. 

If you look at the work of all the great portrait artists in Amsterdam including the old masters, rarely will you see a big smile.  Those were saved for party scenes in the sort of raise-your-cups moment, or tavern scenes.

The best photos for portrait or otherwise will capture the person totally caught in some activity, their mind is perhaps in the moment, or elsewhere, but certainly not thinking of the camera.


Remember, this photo will be the basis for the portrait commission and the artist cannot compensate for a poor pose.

In the case of this particular photo, I set my camera to silent mode, made sure the flash was not active, and the proceeded to make pictures of the unsuspecting Luke throughout breakfast.  In the end I had many many shots to choose from and select for the best light, posture, expression, etc.


Tip # 2: Use the best camera, borrow if necessary

This point is extremely important.  Don't expect to make a picture with your mobile phone and then have a great reference for your portrait. 

Cameras do nasty things to images as it is.  The values tend to be compressed, colors that you see in nature disappear and unless your model is totally still and you're using bracketing, anything other than a nice overcast day will result in darks that are totally black and highlights that are totally white, making the useful tonal range far smaller than what your eye would give you in real life.

Personally, I invested in a Leica, the best of the best.  Leica has a long German tradition of making the best optics in the world, and a big part of what they give you is the ability to avoid chromatic aberration, or plainly stated, they don't distort color.  Therefore the photos I get from it are the closest I've seen to working from life.

Now unless you're a portrait artist the investment may not be justified, but there are some compact versions that you may want to consider.  Other good cameras such as new Canons and Nikons may give you good results as well.



Tip # 3: Select your light conditions wisely
Drawing and painting really boils down to portraying light.  When making a portrait what you're really doing is portraying how light wraps around someone's face.

Keeping in mind that cameras have limitations, try to work with what your camera can do.  A portrait in a dark room may be a great moody and mysterious project to make, but your camera may not allow for a great result.

Full sunlight on someone's face is not always esthetically nice, plus is likely to make them squint.  Interior lights that are too yellow could end up making the face look jaundiced or fake-tanned once the picture is translated to a painting. 

Try to find a pleasant light.  Masters use to work with overcast northern light.  This makes for clean crisp colors and no dramatic shadows.   This looks nice, though you must be good in handing your values.

Others use a direct white light, which makes the light-dark effect more dramatic on the portrait and helps give the face lots of structure.



Tip # 4: Use Photoshop to its full advantage
When you want to make a portrait from photo, a big mistake is to think that great photographers just point and shoot. 

Typically what is happening is professionals spending a large amount of time setting up the light and environment, the model, making a very large number of shots, and finally post-processing or editing.

This editing used to be about how films were revealed in a dark room. Now it's all about photoshop. 

Get used to fiddling around with Photoshop until you have what you want. Take care not to go too crazy with tacky digital effects.  At least in my case, I'm trying to get as close as I can to what I saw during the photo shoot and help the portrait result. 

The portrait of Luke was enhanced a bit in therms of its chroma (saturation) as you can see by comparing a normal picture, versus my enhanced sample:

 

I did this based on what I found pleasing to my eyes, but also taking into consideration that I would make a portrait with pastels, which allow for a very intense use of color if one is so inclined.

Tip # 5: Work from life

Nothing replaces the experience that comes from making a portrait from the live model.  My Amsterdam portrait commissions sometimes allow for this and whenever I can, I take full advantage of this.

The live model offers you depth of form, richness of color and a connection to the subject that will show through in the result.  Yes it is more challenging and hard to arrange.  The model has to sit around for quite some time and it's far from the exciting artistic fun that some people have in mind.  But it really is worth it, whether you're a portrait artist or thinking of a portrait commission.

The work of a portrait artist that only works from photos shows something of a superficial understanding of the technique.  It is usually someone who's just copying one to one what he or she sees in the picture.  This results in an unnatural 'airbrushed' feel in black and white:

And a sort of fake tan combined with flour spots when working in color:

As I've said in previous posts, these are clear examples of bad handling of values and color temperature that come from thinking that in copying a photo you can make a good portrait.

See here two examples of the opposite result, when the artist (in this case yours trully) knows what they're doing:

So this covers some of the process that I use for my portrait commissions in Amsterdam.  I will be following up with a post about handing flesh tones which is usually a challenging subject for beginning artists.

Drawing Lessons in Amsterdam, Museums and Art Heroes

During my drawing lessons in Amsterdam, I've tried to always asks students to visit museums on a regular basis and find art heroes that inspire them.

As a case in point, I recently got back from a short trip to South Carolina and I found a new art hero that I knew little about.  It was a large painting exhibition of Robert Henri, an American realist who worked mainly in portraiture and traveled through Europe, creating portraits of characters he considered interesting.  The exhibition was in the Jepson Museum of Savannah, and focused on the paintings and drawings that Henri created during his time in Spain.

Little did I know I was in for an unexpected treat.  Henri turned out to be a portrait artist in the stature, and in fact very close in style to John Singer Sargent.  Bravura brushwork on the garments combined with impeccable drawing skills, and spectacular treatment of each character.  Many of his pieces were surprising in how much he captured the sitter without having to ad much rendition to the features in the face.  A few correctly placed brushstrokes did the whole trick.  It was probably the first time I saw such simplicity and excellence at the same time.

This is something I try to emphasize during my drawing lessons in Amsterdam.  Not so much the simplicity and excellent part (well, that too) but the idea of visiting museums and having art heroes.  Art heroes are usually the way many of us get started into the artistic adventure in the first place.  We see a relative, a friend or a famous artist and their work makes us want to give it a try.

Funny enough, once we start, we sometimes try to wing it on our own so as not to have our style cramped.  There is this myth going around that copying, imitating and emulating are wrong when trying to draw and paing.

If we compared this to learning how to write a novel, it would be the equivalent to try to saying you can become a great novelist without reading and studying Shakespeare and Cervantes.  You would be likely to write something terrible and worst and peculiar at best.  If you were very very lucky, you would write something good, but that would be your worse scenario, because you would be at a loss to tell what it was that made it good.

Studying our art heroes inspire us to reach the level they reached.  Their handling of drawing, color, composition, brushwork.  These are people who have spent a lifetime solving previously unsolved artistic problems, and all we have to do is look at their work to learn how.  No point facing the vast artistic world on our own and trying to re-invent the wheel.

The second thing that we get from studying great painters, is to create depth and breadth to our knowledge and taste.  In his book 'Steal like an Artist', Austin Kleon suggests that the process of becoming creative is in fact a process of selecting from a large and excellent number of things we like and then create based on that mix while adding our own interpretation.  In that sense, no painting is ever totally original, even if the creator thinks so.

Incidentally, visiting museums and seeing amazing works is not even a chore.  If you are really interested in learning art, and you love art, this would be the best part of your day.  What is a bit more difficult is to learn to analyze what is that makes a work good. To learn and describe it in the terms of the visual language and to decide for yourself what drawings or paintings seem interesting to you and which you will choose to "ignore" regardless whether they are nice or not.

Know the greats, study them deeply.  If there is no technical manual of how they did things, create your own, find the largest .jpg image or poster you can get of their work and analyze it, copy it and describe it in detail. 

You will learn greatly from it!