Last weekend I took a workshop with the portrait painter, John Ennis, held at the Stone Farm Inn in Bucks County. I recommend the place and the opportunity to work with John.
His approach was very helpful to me, since I've had little formal training in the theory of painting.
His approach using burnt umber over the canvas and then creating the portrait by wiping away the lighter areas like a light bulb turning on in my approach to lights and darks and all shades (values) in between. The portrait labelled #2 was actually done in the morning and the other in the afternoon but on a larger canvas. I think it is less successful.
The second lesson was mixing John's somewhat unique pallette of colors and values. He has a rather elaborate array of values but it is an excellent way to appreciate the values of different colors. He starts with 3 greys of different values along with black (0) and white (10). From these 5 shades one can easliy make every shade of greys from 0-10 easily. He then adds red and orange along with burnt umber and lots of white. Various mixtures of the greys, orange, white, and burn umber will give flesh tones also from 0-10. Since we were painting caucasian women, we needed mainly the lighter shades. The darker shades work well for African American portraits.
We worked for 3 days to complete these portraits. More importantly I think I learned a great deal from the workshop even if I don't use John's color array.
The Inn is a bed and breakfast owned and operated by an excellent painter named Jackie Wilcox. She's a great hostess as well and fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment