Grace Pennington

Here is the long awaited photo of progress on the current oil portrait in process.  It’s just a close up.  (The whole painting will be revealed once it is complete.) Spencer is painted with grisaille gray underpainting.  I changed some of his facial structure some. He looks older.  He’s going to change so much as I add more layers and sculpt his face. Sculpture with paint.  Haha.  Also what you see there is the application of the 2nd layer which is the first layer of color.  His hair has the complete second layer.  One thing I’m being a little to cautious of is that I’m afraid to add too much color and what that is doing is making him look very pale.  He looks washed out and almost dead at the current with the full 2nd layer of color.   Kind of creepy.  The gray undertone is coming through really well.  I need to kick up the color.  But I’ll talk more about that later when I can actually show you what I’m talking about.

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I talked about Pennington Studio’s current project, Spencer and Shania, on the PS blog.  Read up about it here and comment.

When it comes to the painting process.  We made the canvas 46″ x 38″.  I put eight layers of Golden Sandable Hard Gesso and two layers of Winsor & Newton Oil Primer.  The sandable gesso allows me to smooth the gesso and prepare for even layers of oil primer.  Oil primer helps the oil paint adhere better to the canvas which gives  smoother, thicker layers of oil paint as it builds up.

Once the canvas is dry and complete, the first step to painting is the drawing.  Every painting (or portrait if you will) starts with a good drawing.  Don’t ever draw in pencil.  The graphite will over time come to the surface of your oil paint and show through.  Use colored pencil instead.  The pigment from the pencil becomes one with the paint.

The next step for the underpainting, I’m doing a combination.  I’m going to give the horse a burnt umber wash and the boy will have grisaille grey underpainting. Next week I will post the progression of the painting, and you can watch the progression.  Slow as it may be, the beginning is the most important.  The better the start, the easier the finish. No do-overs.  That’s the goal, at least for this painting.

Keep painting.