I have taken some photos of my practice oil paintings for your entertainment. Before this class, I knew nothing at all about oil paint. And I am still very clueless, but at least not totally hopeless. We have been learning how to use the paint by doing a whole bunch of simple portraits.
First we learned a wipe-away glazing technique where we tint the whole board over a pencil drawing, and then wipe away and then add back in to create a soft, monochromatic head.
Another way that we worked monochromatically was by using the paints opaquely, with the help of white. We mixed up three basic tones: a dark tone, a middle tone, and a light tone and used them to build up a more solid feeling monochromatic portrait. The portrait below is of my friend Alex. The spheres in the background above his head were mandatory practice spheres that I didn’t completely cover because we didn’t have enough class periods for me to lay more than one coat of paint on top of them. That’s okay though, because both of these pieces are just for practice.
