Big Oil Painting
Portrait
BIG!
In my first year of University whilst on the Fine Art course (which I trasfered from to Illustration) I decided that I wanted to paint a large portrait. I wanted to see how well I could paint at such a large scale. To do this, I purchased a 6 foot tall pice of MDF board and began painting a portrait of my mum.
Painting Loose
I decided that it was important to paint the image freeehand without any sketch of grid to guide me. I began by blocking out areas of color that I had identfied in previous sketches (see above). I began really loose and gradually refined the image further and further. Soon the face began to emerge and it was a case of mixing the appropriate skin tones and applying them.
The painting took about a week to produce working on it 10am until 4pm. I think if I had spent longer on the piece I could have made it more photo-real, but it wasn't really an option given how much they hated what I was doing.
Below you can see photographs I took at different stages of the painting.
