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Old August 30th, 2012 #46
varg
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Join Date: Apr 2004
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http://www.drublair.com/tica.html

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Product Description
This is a painting completed in February 2005. It was a Portrait Class project that I decided to finish in my spare time after the workshop. It probably took a total of around 65-75 hours to complete. The small images are step by step photographs taken during the painting process, and the large image is the final painting after detail and skin texture are added with an eraser and colored pencil. The main colors are blocked in at the beginning, but refinement is withheld until the very end. Look for a more complete step by step article in an upcoming magazine issue~Dru Blair

About this painting

This painting started as an exercise for a portrait workshop I taught in 2005. My previous exercise in portraiture was the Vanessa painting. In order to provide the best reference for my students, I took a digital photograph in my studio of a local model (Tica) with my Nikon Coolpix 8700, then printed copies for each student on my Epson 9600 printer. The goal was to work from reference that provided great lighting, good detail, and accurate skin tones. I intentionally lit and posed Tica in the manner of the old masters, but used contemporary portrait studio elements (such as the smile and white background), to expose the most subtle nuances of her face.

Tica has incredible skin, with a challenging range of colors. As it turned out, the range of colors in her skin proved to be a little overwhelming. Normally, it takes me about 7 or 8 colors to recreate an individual's skin palette, and I blend those on the board to create many more. However with Tica, I found it necessary to mix around 20 different colors to capture her range of color. There were also a few interesting artifacts introduced by the digital camera such as a blue halo around the earring, but I decided to include them in the final painting, because they seemed visually interesting.

By the time the class ended on Sunday, most students had reached a level of completion equivalent to the third image down on the left of the step by step sequence ( I intentionally omitted many of the step by step photographs because I don't want to spoil the upcoming magazine article on the creation of this painting). I need to add here that the purpose of my workshops is not to complete a painting, but rather to use the time optimally so that each student learns the techniques and visual skills necessary to create a photorealistic painting. Once I'm convinced that each student has a grasp of a specific feature, we then move on to another area of the face.