Ruth - stage 1

The painting so far

Well here goes, a portrait of the lovely Ruth Schechner in my "gold" style, this time in oils and bronze powders at the suggestion of Pat Wilshire, the co-organiser of Illuxcon. I am hoping that I can finish this in time as I seem to get lots of disruptions to my working days but at least today I managed to get started. The first thing I did was to try out some ideas on the computer in Photoshop, looking at different poses and different arrangements of gold, black and red (the primary colour scheme for the picture). After agonising over whether to paint it on MDF or canvas (I chose canvas) I first gave it a wash of Burgundy acrylic as I needed an undercolour to work over; I chose acrylic as it is fast drying and I could get on with drawing it up straight away. I gridded up the reference photo I had decided to use from last week's session with Ruth and painted the same grid on the canvas in acrylic as it would not disappear when I start putting the oils over it. Once I had finished "drawing" it up in a mix of Burnt Sienna and Dioxazine Purple oil paint with a stubby oxhair brush I then blocked in the background with the same colour mix (which hid the grid) and then the hair with the same colour mix but a lot more Dioxazine Purple in it.

Gridded up

Working out in Photoshop