Week 4: Face-ing the Facts

For this week, I mostly focused on learning how to paint facial features more dimensionally (based on my first piece, this was clearly necessary), as well as how to perfect my proportions. I quickly realized that there aren't many tutorials on how to improve proportions specifically with oil paint, so I was only able to watch one. Although my proportions aren't the most realistic, I think if the facial features I paint become more realistic, the proportions will naturally follow.

Most of the anatomical videos I watched focused on eyes. One tip almost all the videos touched on was painting the eye sockets before the actual eyes. This will cause me to worry less about the details of the eyes at the beginning of my painting and focus more on blocking in the colors of the face. Another topic that was focused on is ensuring that the sclera (whites of the eyes) is never pure white.

You can see here that no part of the eye is pure white, including the highlight

Even though this is pretty obvious, I found this part of my tutorials very helpful. I tend to always just make the sclera a pure white, which makes the piece appear flat and lifeless. The final tip that stood out to me was to constantly cross-reference your eyes, meaning working on them at the same time as well as constantly looking pack and forth between your painting and your reference for accuracy. Without doing this, the eyes tend to become uneven or lopsided, which doesn't really go along with my goal of realism.

In terms of other facial features, the videos also detailed how to outline things like the nose and the lips before starting the painting. I learned that it's best to start by blocking out the significant planes of the face first so that the specific features and details fall in place more easily. For the video on proportion (fourth link down), the artist suggested to view the planes of the face as shapes so you can more easily fill in the areas while keeping them accurate.

For this week, the tutorials I watched are below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IAaomGpvEA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQmcoih_Na8&list=PLaOE-OZ6Dah-QZkLVh29aZGY6lWRDPYTs&index=26

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgW4-gBdOD8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7H7HDALf7dg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtsEOXmqm1k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkexgkU-tBA

I'm really excited to implement what I learned this week into my portrait next week. Stay tuned!

P.S. For this week, I commented on Sloane, Sam Greene, and Victoria's blogs.