Portrait Painting Course

I have just began to attend to a portrait painting course at the School of Arts of the Catholic University of Chile. Last semester I was attending a watercolour course, my first attempt with painting. It was a nice experience as an introduction to the technique, I will keep practicing and sketching; watercolor is not an easy technique; later I will post some of my work.

The painting sessions will we each thursday. Our teacher is Francisco Schwember, check it out his web page at http://www.franciscoschwember.cl/

Now I am so excited with my first oil painting class that I am posting a sequence of my first four- hours class. The model is in the following photo.




First, we made a portrait sketch of the model in charcoal, which I fixed with airspray (Alberto VO5 worked just OK.)

Following the drawing, we mixed Burnt Sienna and Sap Green (alkyd colors for fast dry) with alkyd medium to make a thin color to apply a glaze. I used Gamblim medium and Windsor and Newton colors. We added standard medium to make the mix thinner an less gooey.

After applying the glaze we used a rag to get the lights from the painting, and have some volumes.

We waited for the glaze to dry while we had cup of coffe, and later we prepare a palette: Sap Green, Burnt Sienna, and Zinc White, mixed with a little of Alkyd white that a classmate kindly provided -it could have been just alkyid white, but I did not get it so we had to improvise. Using just this limited palette we continued painting the subject, light to dark. Now we have to wait until the next session, on thursday evening.