Painting and Drawing the Head E-Book

Daniel Shadbolt

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Painting and Drawing the Head combines technical instruction, art history references and thoughts on the day-to-day practice of painting the head from life. The rich text, supported by over 100 paintings, gives a thoughtful account of the process of capturing a likeness. After introducing materials, principles and ideas, it follows the course of painting a head in five sittings, providing unique insight and practical comment throughout: from the choice of ground for the picture, through the set-up, the structure of the sessions, guidance on how to compose and what palette to use, all the way to the later stages of developing a portrait over time. There are equipment notes about what to paint on and what to paint with; the importance of looking, and training your eyes; advice on tone, colour, perspective and composition; photographs to explain lighting decisions and set-ups; and notes on painting a self-portrait. Aimed at all artists, particularly portrait painters, and superbly illustrated with 265 colour photographs that explain lighting decisions and set-ups.

Leseprobe

Painting and Drawing the Head

DANIEL SHADBOLT

THE CROWOOD PRESS

First published in 2016 by

The Crowood Press Ltd

Ramsbury, Marlborough

Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2016

© Daniel Shadbolt 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 164 2

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the artist and teacher Roger Ackling (1947–2015), whose generosity and humility in his teaching was an inspiration and support while I was a student at Chelsea College (2000–3).

A special thank you

I would like to thank The Heatherley School of Fine Art in London for their help with printing the working copies of this text for purposes of revision, and for access to their library. I would also like to thank the first year students of 2015 on the Portrait Diploma course for their help and hard work. Berni Timko, Harriet Doherty, Rosie Kingston and James Betts deserve a special thank you for allowing me to reproduce their paintings in this book. Many of the photographs of my paintings and drawings were taken by Andy Warrington, and I am very grateful to him for this. Chris Moock, Sharon Brindle, Julie Jones and Nicole Ashchurch very graciously gave their time and skill to help with proof-reading. Jason Bowyer kindly wrote a foreword. Thank you all so much!

Contents

Foreword by Jason Bowyer

Introduction

Part I: The Essentials

Chapter 1 Equipment

Chapter 2 Drawing and Looking

Chapter 3 First Principles of Painting

Chapter 4 Composition, Perspective, Light and Tone

Part II: Painting the Head

Chapter 5 Day I: Bold Beginnings

Chapter 6 Day 2: Clarity of Tone

Chapter 7 Day 3: Developments, Alterations and New Beginnings

Chapter 8 Day 4: Evaluate the Composition and Scale

Chapter 9 Day 5: Look More Than You Paint

Part III: Notes for the Painter

Chapter 10 Self-portraits

Chapter 11 The Portrait

Acknowledgements

Index

Foreword

To draw and paint a portrait you need to have an understanding of materials, techniques and methods alongside a sound philosophical aim. This book gives you these fundamental skills. Daniel creates a coherent but personal approach to teaching you how to draw or paint a portrait. He is a dedicated painter and teacher who will open your eyes and expand your vision with his thoughtful anecdotes and quotes. The complex process of portraiture is simplified in this book allowing you to look, then draw or paint the physicality and character of the person who has come to sit for you.

Jason Bowyer PPNEAC RP PS

Samuel by Jason Bowyer (charcoal); winner of the Prince of Wales Portrait Drawing Prize, Royal Society of Portrait Painters, 2015.

Introduction

Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself.

– Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863)

Anticipation of a new subject coming to sit for their portrait concentrates the mind to action: preparations have to be made, equipment should be ready, and a ground colour can even be prepared in advance. You may have studied the sitter’s photograph or have tried to remember what the person looks like. After all this, they may contact you saying that they are running late, and at this point you can find yourself unable to do anything else until they have arrived and you can begin.

Hugh Valentine, 2010; an informal portrait to accompany a more formal commission.

There is no experience in painting equivalent to the directness of painting the head from life. For one thing it is good to have company in the studio. If it is a friend their face is something you cannot quickly tire of looking at, and conversations had whilst painting can enrich the day. It is certainly different from copying from another source. I first became involved with portraiture after tackling still life and imaginary landscapes collaged from National Geographic magazines at school. I used photographs of people that I knew well and would attempt to paint their likeness whilst I was alone. I set out with the aim to make the picture as life-like as possible, but now looking back at these pictures they appear to have a particular style.

Working from life

I have come to put more trust in the pictures made in response to working from life, with the person actually being there. Sometimes a picture will work - and quickly too - while at other times it goes on and on without seeming to achieve anything worthwhile. This is probably the greatest vulnerability of portrait painting, that there is never a guarantee of obtaining the desired result. Over years of accumulated experience, you can learn practices and methods which will give the best chance of success, but even then, there is always a chance that the picture will collapse from within and appear lifeless. This can be an unhappy moment and you can lose all patience or belief in the construction of an image. At such a point it is good to remember how exciting beginning a picture can be.

Once begun, a picture can seem to have a life all of its own, with each mark placed one after the other in a logical or emotional response without a single error until the painting is finished. Needless to say this is the rarer kind of progress, and the majority of paintings will register somewhere between success and failure. The more experience of painting you gain the better you will be equipped to understand what is working and what is not, although there is no immediate formula to success. Painting is unpredictable and can sometimes be resistant to your intentions, but never forget the importance of feeling and intuition in your work.

About this book

The book as a whole is a collection of lessons I have been taught and have come to consider as good practice for anyone painting the head from life. Since the head is connected to the figure, much of this approach to painting could be applied to life or figure painting too.

The first part (Chapters 1–4) gathers together the essentials, offering a reference section that is broad in its scope and can be used in a variety of ways, depending on your level of experience. You may for example wish to skip the first chapter and read it after the rest of the book. The second part (Chapters 5–9) describes the practical aspects of making an observed painting from life over several sessions. In the third part (Chapters 10, 11) there are notes on painting self-portraits, showing how to use yourself as a model – something that can be done at any time – followed by a concluding chapter discussing problems, issues and advice on portrait painting.

How you see things

A good starting point to consider is this: how can we look at something specific but still keep a grasp on the whole painting?

In very general terms, the way I can teach you to paint the head is to reverse the order in which you decide to paint it. Rather than starting with the eyes, look at the outline of the head and the big shapes within it. Working inwards from this outer structure can lead to the drawing of the features being better related, since they will fit into the shape of the head, rather than the head being drawn in around it.

As you may expect, this instruction is only a guide or an alternative approach. It is a method, like all other methods, which you should try if you have not already. You may of course find it suits your drawing better to build up and outwards from the centre.

The main practice is to be able to control your looking. This, over time, will form the basis of training your eye. To paint from life successfully, it can be a case of looking in the right way at the right time. My reason for tending towards a ‘whole picture’ approach is that often the eyes are the dominant feature in a picture. There is nothing wrong with this, since it is surely the eyes that are most revealing. Always we must paint what we see, but also we must bear in mind that how we see is influenced by what we are thinking about. Throughout the years I have spent painting, the way I see paintings has developed. I think vision in painting is highly personal and that it changes over time.

One aspect of continually looking at paintings that affected me was the consideration of the various surface areas of a picture. How much space does the head occupy in relation to the rest of the picture? Alternatively, you might question the amount of canvas that supports the painting of the eyes as a fraction of the whole surface area of the painting. Does the head benefit from having space around it? There are no definite answers to this question, but it is important that you consider it within your vision. Many paintings reveal upon closer inspection a vast discrepancy between the detailed work the painter put into painting the eyes of a portrait and the thinly painted background that surrounds it. As a whole, this may not be very satisfying to look at for any length of time.

Think of Gainsborough’s half-length and even full-length portraits. The eyes are brilliantly painted, but what you will see first is the head as a whole. One of the most difficult things to draw is the relationship between the eyes and the head, and seeing somebody’s feet at the same time as seeing their head is practically impossible. All the detail in the head is lost temporarily in your vision as you look at the whole from a distance. It is very difficult to train your eye to see everything. In a small portrait the eyes might occupy one twentieth of the whole picture surface. In a bigger picture the eyes will be a much smaller fragment of the whole. This awareness of the relative area size should put order into the construction of a picture, making the larger areas initially a greater concern for the painter.

The sitter’s experience

As a model, sitting for a portrait is initially a pleasant way to spend your time, but it can develop into an incredibly tiring and concentrated activity. Eye contact with the painter can be tricky to maintain. Conversation can help but may also be distracting.

As a good way to improve your understanding of the process and to develop empathy for the person modelling I recommend sitting for a friend who paints. It is worth remembering that in an art class setting there are guidelines for modelling times: a fifteen-minute break after every forty-five minutes of painting is standard, and if the class runs for several hours, then stretch breaks are usually taken every twenty-five minutes or half-an-hour.

Natasha (profile study), 2011; a beginning of a painting, laying down areas of colour.

Jill, 2012; first stage.

Jill, 2012; second stage.

Jill, 2012; third stage.

Jill, 2012; fourth stage.

Jill, 2013.

The painter’s vision

During a painting it can be difficult to keep following your vision. Without realizing it there may be a shift of scale in the drawing, which changes the picture. We tend to draw what we are interested in as larger than that which we are not so interested in, but with training this can be countered and the distortions can be minimized so as to increase the objectivity of the drawing.

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) said that he wanted to create as much inter-relation as possible in his drawings. This is not the same as accumulating detail. Cézanne’s ‘inter-relation’ seems to me to mean ‘seeing’ something at the same time as something else and connecting those two elements in the picture. This is different to looking at things in a sequence. It will take a long time in terms of effort and practice to be able to do this, but doing it will also help to explain the construction of space in a Cézanne drawing which may only consist of a few lines.

There are many things to watch out for, but as a first step, the most important is that you must follow what you see. In other words be careful that you do not look more at your painting than your model, and whenever you see something different, make the change to the picture no matter how dramatically different it is. Chasing the model like this with the drawing is the most reliable way to keep the picture up-to-date with how you are seeing.

Preparation and change

One example of being prepared to change everything at the last minute is captured in this series of photos that document a painting I was doing of Jill. In the first four photos of this picture each session builds on the previous without a major alteration. In the last session a movement of the head suggested an alternative composition that I thought would be an improvement to the image. The light source also changed as the position of the model was altered.

All of the preliminary build-up over hours of observation was a help in order to know better what I wanted to paint, and in generating the conditions where a risk could be taken. This process is not to be recommended when first starting out as it can lead to frustration and fragmented images. It is generally better to build up a calm consolidation of drawing over time. However, taking a chance with a picture can lead to a more refreshing visual arrangement.

Deliberation and patience are traditional components to the making of a portrait, and working from life is the best way to gain a sustained look at a real head, especially as seeing takes a long time. Getting to know your subject should lead to changes and surprises. Sometimes it is necessary to be flexible to meet these shifts in perception.

PART I: THE ESSENTIALS

CHAPTER 1

Equipment

When I was at Chelsea College of Art and Design, Mali Morris confessed how interesting she found each painter’s palette to be. The individuality of the palette potentially reflects something about the artist who uses it. She claimed that this subject was worthy of attention in itself. Exhibitions of paintings frequently have the painter’s tools placed in a cabinet as artefacts worthy of curiosity. When an artist is well known, the plainest objects associated with their working practice become of interest. These ‘tools of the trade’ give an insight into how an artist works and how they achieve particular effects through their favoured materials.