ARSENAL UWCL CHAMPIONS!!!

Still trying to get the hang of this oil painting stuff. Some say watercolor is harder, but having done both, idk, I find oil to be next-level. Different paints drying at different rates. Some colors drying glossy, others matte (and does one "oil out" or not if that happens?). Fat over lean. Mediums, solvents, what primer to use for your surface. Color mixing: I got away in watercolor with layering individual colors to get the hues and values I wanted, but in oil you can't do this; you have to mix everything bang on from the start.

The hardest part, imo, is that you can't hide your brushwork. OK, well, you can: you can blend everything out or paint with the tiniest brush known to man and achieve a hyperrealistic look, but I was going for a kind of brushy, John Singer Sargent-like look, which turns out to involve laying each brushstroke down over paint that is still wet (working "wet-in-wet" as painters call it) and not correcting the stroke afterwards.

Detail of facial area showing brushwork.

At most, you can soften some edges (going over the mark gently with a clean brush), and knowing which edges to do that for and which to leave alone is Its Own Thing. (Edge control is one of the biggest things separating really good from not-so-good realist work: the latter tends to leave everything sharp or to over-soften everything.) Trying to do more than that, however, will unavoidably make things worse, so if you get the stroke wrong, you have to scrape off what you did and try again. And when you're working into paint that's still wet, you have to know exactly how much paint to put on your brush, and what angle to hold your brush at when applying the next layer: otherwise it just won't take.

Now I understand why even a genius like Sargent spent four years training under the best portrait painter in Paris to master this style.

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Process pics + yapping:

STAGE ONE. The outlines of the head were roughly sketched in charcoal, then an abstract background was laid in using terre verte (a green natural earth pigment, the light green color) and viridian mixed with a touch of transparent red oxide (the dark green color), applied with a large flat brush. The background was done first to aid in accurate judging of the tones and values of the face, which is difficult to near impossible on a white canvas.

Some artists will paint a light wash of color over the entire canvas to begin, also in order to make the judging of colors/values easier. But since I was aiming to do this work alla prima, painting fresh layers on top of still-wet paint, I didn't want to contend with layering warm flesh tones over green. (An old Italian technique called verdaccio exists where an artist paints a portrait entirely in shades of green, establishing the correct values or contrasts between light and dark, before painting over the image in its final colors. This is supposed to lend the flesh tones greater vibrancy, especially if bits of the underpainting are left to show through. However, these artists would always have allowed the green underpainting to dry thoroughly before proceeding.)

STAGE TWO. A base of flesh pink (venetian red tinted with lead white) was laid over part of the face. The eye and nose area were then defined, and the tonality of other areas of skin varied with pinks, reds, and yellows.

A lot of portraitists would have done a first pass over all the major features, instead of completely finishing one area before moving on to the next. I have always found it natural to do the latter and to start with the eye region specifically: it serves as an anchor for the rest of the face, and if done properly, there will instantly be life, a human presence, in the canvas. That's a shot of confidence and a great source of motivation to continue.

STAGE THREE. When painting a subject with facial hair, as a rule, I first layer other colors underneath the area bordering on or to be covered by hair. Where Novak's hair is showing under his cap, too, I painted flesh tones beyond where the hairline would have begun. If I were to try to guess exactly where the skin ended and the hair began and painted up to there, I would get a hard boundary or even a tiny gap of white between skin and hair, which looks bad. Even in thick facial hair you can also have slivers of skin (or some other color) showing through: so layering is a must.

Note the red on the jawline: in the source photo, there was a strong reflection of red/orange light from the shirt Novak was wearing. After the hair is layered in, the secondary lighting will look natural.

STAGE FOUR. The facial hair was laid in over the mouth, chin and jawline. The hair in front of the ear and at the back of the head was painted, and the form of the neck at the nape further modeled with shading.

STAGE FIVE. The cap and shirt were painted. At this point, with all areas of the canvas worked to more or less a finished state (only the ear remained to be done), some flaws in the face and neck became noticeable. Some were small details, but the biggest issue was that the face and neck were too pale compared to the source photo, especially after the very intense orange/red of the shirt was incorporated.

Fortunately, I determined that repainting the whole face/neck would not be necessary. I did repaint the neck, because there were a couple of spots of wrong-colored facial hair that needed to be eliminated, but on the face I darkened the nose, eye socket, and cheek area, and that was enough to get the whole thing looking half a notch darker.

This took 14 hours over two days; I was hoping to finish it in one day (to paint alla prima is literally to "do it in one go"), but some areas, the cap and the shirt particularly, really threw me for a loop. (They look drop dead simple, but they're not! Or rather, painting something so simple-looking, and having the result look simple-looking, is anything but simple ... at least for an oil noob like me.)

But it's OK, I'm improving! My first head took four days, my second one (the one before this one) three ... so I guess my next one ought to be one day's work??