I love this painting of Christ, the original is done by Ted Henniger, an amazing painter by the way. It isn't in print anymore and I wanted to purchase it for my home decor, so instead I decided to recreate from a photo of the original. I took this as an opportunity to add more color and paint with my style of brushwork, putting a lot of palette knife work into the beard and highlights on the forehead. It took me about a week, a total of 24 hours. Definitely better than I expected.
This is the largest peice I have painted to date. It took a huge amount of work, more than anticipated. lol My focus is still figure, I set up the lighting myself and tried to draw the focus to her face. There's a whole array of colors in her face which I had tons of fun painting and trying to keep them in harmony with one another. I would've liked to see the backround painted a little more loosely and less glazing necessary, but it's coming along nicely.
My huge gap in postings is mostly due to marrying the perfect woman. :) This portrait study was going to be a full figure of the model in a pirate costume but the "likeness" of the model in my work has been lacking and I wanted to focus more on just the head for a time. It was a short session and I would've liked to have some more time to work on it, but que sera' sera'.
So I pulled out a large canvas from when I was looking to paint one head a day and noticed a huge improvement form one year ago! The missionary looking head is from summer 2009 and the other two are from Wednesday, Sept. 29th and today. I'm dedicating about an hour and a half to two hours to each one of these , focusing on speed an and choosing large shapes of color. I started picking out the differences in style, paint quality, and composition. It's nice to see the artist in me begin to pull everything together! :)
