This January and February the Paint4Fun group worked on portraits.
We started the term with sketching a loose portrait in charcoal while we learned the basic proportions of the face. It is surprising to note that eyes are positioned halfway down the face. A common beginner mistake is to draw eyes too high up, also tempting we found, to make eyes too big. We painted a portrait using just one colour plus white. This is called a Grisaille painting.
Next we looked at how to get skin tones using a restricted colour palette. It is easier to use just a few carefully selected colours because there are simple mixing choices. The paints we used were red, yellow ochre, black and white. This is known as the Zorn palette as it was made famous by Anders Zorn (Swedish Artist 1860 – 1920) whose beautiful portraits were painted with these colours. In this palette of colours there is no blue, but we found that a surprisingly blue effect can be achieved with grey when juxtapositioned with warm tones such as red or orange. Also a very nice (if muted) green comes from mixing yellow ochre with black.
All in all it was an interesting and enjoyable topic and gave us a chance for a few welcome hours each week to forget the wintery weather outside.
