For this project I decided to look at portraiture in painting and the range of techniques used to create moods, emotions and textures. To help me achieve this, I firstly collected a range of photographs of students from around the studios and asked them to pull interesting faces and expressions, this really helped me to get a wide variety of expressions and facial shapes to work with.
In my paintings not only did i wish to explore a range of techniques, such as using palette knives and flat or round brushes but I also wanted to explore colours as artists Paul Wright and Andrew Salgado use in their work, which aren’t seen as a traditional colour palette for portraiture.
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| (21mm x 30mm) |
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| (21mm x 30mm) |
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| (30mm x 21mm) |
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| (30mm x 21mm) |
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| (30mm x 21mm) |
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| (30mm x 21mm) |
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| (30mm x 21mm) |
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| (84mm x 59mm) |
I felt that some of these paintings were differently more sucessful than other and there is a small amount of paintings I would call disasters in the mix but these were merely experiments for my final large painting. I just wanted to see a range of possibilities i could use and direct the paint before committing to one style, I came to the conclusion that a combination of realism and a more laid back approach I tried with flat brushes would work really well together. A solid realism piece to me just seemed a little on the boring side, so by adding in randoms strokes of paint throughout the painting it would act out to break up the image.
