Today in class we took our gessoed paper, drew our portrait, and got to work. Many of the students watched Sandy do her demo of a mountain man from Friendship, Indiana, and then did their own version of the same man. I painted Mr. Forbes. Mr. Forbes is 72 (?) and still is the main groundskeeper at the Gerace Field Station in San Salvador, Bahamas. He is still going strong, mowing and weeding and tending the place and keeping everything looking good. It needs a bit of tweaking (the mouth seems too hard-lined and needs to be softened a bit and the bit of beard and moustache mixed with grey could be worked on a bit more) but it's almost there and it does look like him. 
Because Mr. Forbes is an island man, I stamped sea turtles in the gesso before I started painting. You may be able to see them in the photo but may not - they are small all around him in the blue and on his tee shirt.Then, because I finished with this one quickly, I started another from a photo given to me by a classmate - from a copyright free photo site. I am not happy with this so I will show you how you can work with gesso when you don't like it --- here is the painting ---
Now watch when you wash it all off under the sink to start over --- (tease) --- you'll have to wait until tomorrow for that!
No comments:
Post a Comment