Portrait Nerding

Alright, buckle up! I've got bit of technical stuff that I'm thinking about when it comes to portraits tonight. Firstly, of course, Wednesday night is portrait night... The big thing for me this session was that I was really digging the idea of painting onto a darker canvas. So I added a nice dark brown layer of paint to the canvas this morning so it was dry for this evening's painting. I really wanted a lot of my dark values to be mostly there for me from the start, and to only have to focus particularly on the values lighter than the canvas. This is in line with what's often taught about oil painting - it's easier to paint your lights over your darks. Usually I start with a whit or off-white canvas and work down the value scale, painting both light and dark at the same time. It works, but I get bored often, and doing things differently keeps the panic of messing things up close-at-hand. I like the feeling of working just barely outside of my comfort zone, so I figured I'd give this a try today. It worked out really well! I'm gonna have to try this a few more times before I get bored and move on to something else...

-ZR