I finished my watercolor portrait workshop with Hamid at Gage Academy this past week, but I still wanted to learn more, so I checked out Scott Waddell‘s Art of the Painting video. It’s great! His demo is for oil, but most of his principles work for all classical painting. He starts off ‘posterizing’ the major lights and darks, establishes the values, then shifts into conceptualizing mode, carving the face in 3D in color. I found the method straightforward and much simpler than just trying take in all the information at once. Scott supplements his painting with video illustrations of the behavior of light on 3D surfaces.
Here are 2 portraits that are more exercises / WIP rather than finished works. The girl is from this 1966/1967 film adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. I still have more I would like to do on that piece, but the RMCAD school year starts up in a week, and I’m going to see if I can learn more about composition before then.
