I'm taking two classes at the moment: the second part of Foundation Figure Painting, and a class in Pastel Portraits. For the first one, the homework was to paint a self portrait in oil. Here's the second layer. It's still in progress, obviously. I started with a pink and green (red/green complementary color) base, and decided my face was way too pink and not yellow enough, so for the second layer I took the dark pink paint, added a bunch of cadmium yellow, and then added in more white to lighten it up again. The chin needs more green still, that'll be layer 3, and the background needs to be dulled (the sheet behind me was white, with kind of light umber shadows) and the shirt needs work but I hate drapery :)



For Pastel Portraits, we're currently working on a portrait of a model named Caroline who has dark brown hair and pale olive skin -- sort of Mediterranean coloring -- in a light colored dress against light pastel backgrounds. There's a whole bunch of turn-of-the-century work in a similar vein -- you can look up "white portraits" of Whistler, Sargent, Klimt and others -- so homework was to copy one of the master works. I picked a Klimt (yes, it's Klimt, even though it looks like a cross between Toulouse-Lautrec and Mucha) to copy. Here it is. Some hat, eh?
Here is the original Klimt.