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| "Gayle" 16x20 oil/canvas Painted over two days with three 20-minute sessions each day (Plus a certain amount of adjusting at odd hours) |
Recently, I took a portrait painting class at the Art Students League of New York through its E-Telier system. I didn't do it with the expectation that portrait painting would inform my landscape painting—but if you read on, you'll see that's exactly what happened.
In my plein air painting workshops, I tell my students, “You can get away with a lot in painting the landscape.” And it's true. Move a tree here or there, trim down a mountain—unless it's a well-known landmark, no one's going to know. You're not painting a portrait of the landscape and trying to get an accurate likeness. Mostly, you're just trying to depict a sense of the “moment” and the feeling the landscape inspires. Getting the picture to look exactly like the view at your precise GPS location is usually a waste of paint.
But in portrait painting, the goal is often different—getting an accurate likeness. Depicting the head with realism demands good observational and drawing skills, supplemented with a knowledge of anatomy. Together, these will give you a reasonable-looking head. However, to create a true likeness, those skills need to be raised a notch higher—and having patience helps. (We plein air painters are an impatient bunch, mostly due to our habitually hurrying because of the moving sun.)
Painting the portrait (and the figure) competently is something I've always aspired to. Why? Because I consider this to be one of the most difficult skills to master. As an artist, I feel it's important to push myself and to keep learning. Although I've painted portraits in the past, they've not been very good. Applying plein air painting techniques to the portrait get you part way there, but it's about as satisfying as assembling the components of a gourmet meal and then stopping short of following the recipe all the way to the dining table.
But before I get into my thoughts on how painting portraits can inform your landscape painting, let me share some helpful observations I made from my class:
1. Study anatomy. I've always believed if you paint what you see you'll end up with a reasonable facsimile of your subject. This works fine with the landscape, but with the portrait, it's the long, bumpy, uncomfortable route edged with steep drop-offs. Knowing anatomy and the basic rules of human proportion make for a speedier finish. Having a mental image of what the “ideal” human looks like will give you something to correct your work by.
2. But before striving for a likeness, first paint the head generally. Informed by your study of anatomy, start a portrait by just painting an accurate depiction of the simple beauty of how light and color work on the subject before you. This is, indeed, rather like making a plein air painting but with an additional emphasis on also trying to get the drawing right. The result should be a realistic-looking head. Then, if you want to take the next step and get a likeness, only a few minute changes should be needed—perhaps a shift in the eyebrow, a lift to the lip, a widening of the nostrils. These tiny bits, however, come from more careful observation and patience.
3. Pre-mix your colors. Although some landscape painters like to pre-mix piles of color, I don't. I think this can lead to unimaginative, flat color in the painting. I enjoy the subtle variations that come from mixing color on the fly. However, this doesn't work so well with portraits. These variations, when applied to areas of what is supposed to be human flesh, can be ghastly and alarming—and worse yet, hard to adjust once put down. A better plan is to figure out the general color of the skin and then pre-mix your light, mid-tone and shadow values; you can always punch up the color later. (By the way, I quickly found myself adding the siennas and umbers to my split-primary palette so I could mix skin colors more easily and quickly in the 20-minute poses.)
Now, how can all this aid us in painting the landscape? First, underlying your beautiful scene is geology. Yes, you can paint the landscape as you see it, but understanding how different classes of rocks behave, how the strata they make up can be contorted into anticlines and synclines and how other natural forces erode and reshape these features will be a great help in drawing things realistically. Just as a knowledge of anatomy can help with the portrait, a knowledge of geology can help with the landscape.
Second, it's okay to just to “capture the moment,” where your aim is to depict the simple beauty of how light and color work on your scene. The landscape will look realistic, so long as your painting is informed by your knowledge of geology. Then, to get the likeness, perhaps it will need just a few minor changes: altering the “sky holes” of a tree, adding an identifying crack in the rock, deepening the curve of the river.
Finally, pre-mixing color can be useful, too. If I'm painting in a situation where speed is involved, such as a timed event or if I have a large canvas to cover, I might pre-mix my basic colors. When pressed for time, trying to match a mixture you desperately need but have run out of can be frustrating. I'm still a big fan of the color variations that come with mixing on the fly, but sometimes that approach isn't feasible.
So, what's it like, painting from life via Zoom? Well, to be honest, it's far from ideal. First of all, you're painting from a two-dimensional image. The third dimension—which we depend on so much for seeing the turning of form—is missing. Also, you'll discover blind spots with regard to bone and muscle structure, and you'll have to fake what's happening in those areas unless you have a strong command of anatomy. Second, if a model is using a smartphone or laptop camera and has it too close (as will happen with a portrait), the lens will distort features. Things closer to the camera will look larger than they are, and if you paint what you see, proportions will be distorted, sometimes monstrously so. And finally, painting a live model on a screen can be a spooky experience. With a good model, who remains absolutely motionless, it's easy to forget that you're working from life; you begin to think you're painting from a photo. But when the model suddenly blinks or shifts, you are abruptly brought back to reality—an unsettling moment. Remember the scene in one of the Harry Potter films where the painted portrait on the wall suddenly winks? It's a bit like that.
Here's another portrait from the class.
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| "Angel" 16x12 oil/linen Also two days, three 20-minute sessions per day |
