This week I am busy taking an oil painting portrait workshop with artist Letty Nowak http://www.lettynowak.com at The Studios of Key West. I have painted portraits before, but never with any instruction. And I really wanted to know how a serious portrait painter approaches it. In the photo above I have roughed in a sketch. I thought it was fine while I was doing it, then I saw fatal flaws, the nose was too long and the face wasn't wide enough.
In the above photo I have made corrections and started to block in the color. There are still flaws, but I feel I can make some corrections and it will be passable. I'd like you all to know that the brave soul who said he'd be my test subject is my brother Bill Rogers, http://www.jenandtonicband.com , who besides being a wonderful musican, is very good looking so I don't want to screw this up. As you can see this workshop is about painting from a photo and one really interesting thing that Letty said is that portraits painted from photos where the subject is not smiling end up looking more like paintings then ones where the subject is smiling. And I can notice in the class that this is true. For the most part the smiling portraits look more like photos and just a little cheesy.
And here is the pottery I made last week. There a some cute new flip flops designs and lots of bright colors, as always.
The portrait is nicely done! It's fun to see you do another media besides your super fun, colorful pottery. That's a great challenge to give yourself. Thanks for sharing the before and after, brave soul!
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