Oil Portrait - Process
First off, there is a degree of controversy surrounding photorealistic and realistic paintings. There are those who question the purpose of this style of painting. Why not just take a picture? You can read what I have to say about it.
Any good portrait painted from a picture needs to be painted from a good picture. For this portrait, I took around 50 photos in effort to find just the right photo that the parents of the child liked and that would work well as a large painting.
To get the bulk of the image onto the canvas, I project an overhead copy of the picture onto the canvas. This allows me to find and place the main shapes of the image. I mostly focus on finding the highlights and shadows during this process. Once I have an overall draft of where the main shapes of the shadows and highlight are, I move on to the underpainting.
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The underpainting is a monochromatic version of the image. For this I use a Burnt Umber color. Turpenoid works as an eraser and is used to wipe away or thin the Burnt Umber color in areas where it is too dark or too heavy. Burnt Umber is used because it adds to the depth of the skin color once the painting is complete. Even when the painting is complete, light will still work its way through the layers of color to the underpainting.
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