Portrait of Da all finished

Portrait of Da

Attempting Da in oils once again, so this is my second ever attempt at oil painting. I learned a lot from the last one. This time there were no wite spirits to be used for anything but cleaning the brushes as the fumes give me a headache no matter how much I ventilate and it just causes problems later on. I did forget like a tool to take process shots this time, so after painting from 2 today until midnight I got this (and no matter how much I kept the lid on the jar of white spirit, another headache)

I'm pretty happy with it so far. His head should be wider but I can live with it. The medium is fun to work with but hard to control sometimes and it can be very unforgiving. I'm trying to keep it soft and maintain the planes of the face, its bloody hard man. Looking forward to finishing it though and seeing how it turns out.

Portrait in oil

I started my first ever oil painting this afternoon. Want to do good portraits so I started out with a picture of my Da in his navy days which recently came to a close. Here he is on guard of honour duty for president Robinson sometime in the 90's (It was shortly after he got back from his tour in Lebanon is all I can remember)

So I started off sketching onto the canvas paper... stuff. It was a pain, mainly due to me not being happy with it no matter what I did, but the material finish of the paper is hard to draw on, all you can really do is mark and smudge

I started off with a brown wash thing going on

My main problem was that I had no idea how to mix a medium with the oils to get desired effects, so I stuck with the white spirits for a while and then randomly switched to a bottle of liquin I bought for just such an emergency

And thats just about where I left it I think, I did do a little more, but nothing of note, I think I played with the tones and planes of the face more and added some colour to the cap brim. All in all a hell of a fun day, im high as hell from the white spirits, gonna have to get some odourless stuff for sure.