Steve Husted: portrait artist?

HOLY CRAP this was a hard painting to do. I spent a little over 3 hours just on the oil painting. That’s more time than I’ve spent on any one painting since I started painting again in September.

Phew!

This portrait is of Rajashree Raghavendra, and is for the Different Strokes for Different Folks (DSFDF) painting challenge blog that Karin Jurick hosts. It’s a lot of fun and very challenging and, for me, can be pretty stressful. She painted me.

By the way, I should say that, yes, I am available for commissions if you so happen to see this painting and think you’d like to have one done for you or a loved one. Or a despised one; makes no diff to me.

I was going to take a bunch of pictures as I went through the process but I got sucked into the painting and next thing you know, it’s 10:40pm and the wife is headin’ off to bed and I’ve still got at least an hour of work to do.

Here’s the reference photo and my painting. Please note that I tweaked the ref photo for brightness and contrast and saturation a bit. It was dark when I got it. Also note that my painting was photographed in my kitchen under fluorescent lights (it is just about midnight so I’ll have to get the full sunlit painting tomorrow, hoping the weather permits) so it’s not really representative of the work (it’s brighter than this). Edit: got a picture outside – it’s overcast but the colors are definitely coser to reality. Not exactly, but pretty close.

Okay, okay, enough blathering, here’s the process for this painting:

• Started with drawing in graphite pencil, made it permanent with fixative
• Came in with the gray background and outlined the face and laid in the major landmarks
• Came in with darkest darks (always scary at this point!)
• tried mixing up the darkest flesh tones – took me probably 5 puddles of paint before I got color/value I liked
• laid in the dark flesh tones, followed by the mids, and came back through with the lights (bright yellow, not pure white)
• Worried over the mouth. I ended up getting it pretty good. Note: I don’t paint teeth. I paint a grayish yellow area with a darker shadow and a black line at the top
• Freaked out over the eyes, so I blobbed some black outlines, black pupils, and dark gray “whites” to set it in. Left it at that for a while
• Came back through to get the reflected lights. Could have done better on the nose but the paint wasn’t agreeing with me. I need better brushes.
• Scarf/hair laid in
• Used a palette knife (the sharp edge) to scratch in some gray hairs. Sorry, Raja, but they’re there so I put ‘em in!
• Re-did the glasses shadow like 4 times. It’s a purplish pink flesh tone and was hard to get. I ended up adding some Burnt Sienna to get it to look right in the painting
• Worked on the eyes like a freak
• Decided to go with an “unfinished” look. I like that look. Also wanted to include some blue in the shirt for unity (there’s blue in the hair and a touch of green in some of the flesh to “gray” out the red)
• The part in the hair gave me some trouble but I think I nailed it
• Finished the eyes. Again.
• Came through with some highlights and a smaller brush
• More eye work
• Used the palette knife to suggest glasses rims – a black line and a gray line, top and bottom
• MORE eye work – reworked most of the eyes and liked them better
• Reworked the neck to make it darker and to add the single brush stroke for the entire lit side (I like when I can get something done in a single stroke… of course, it took like 8 strokes before that one to get the right color/tone)
• Finishing touches, ensuring I didn’t miss anything
• Finished up eyes with highlights on lower lids and “alive” highlight on pupil
• Put the earrings in (they’re grey, believe it or not)
• Done!