Aug 26th: Finished Portrait in Oil Paint

It's done!  Yay!  Oh man did I have the hardest time stopping.  I kept finding issues all over the place.  There's still things that I want to fix after all of it.  But I told myself, you'd better stop or you're going to mess it up.  If I had infinite time and infinite patience, I would fix the mouth for the billionth time.  Since I was working with a wallet sized picture, I found it helpful to take a picture of my painting with my phone and then compare the two that way.  Sometimes the size of the thing distorts what I'm trying to compare.  According to my comparing, the mouth is still too narrow and needs to go out to the right slightly.  But... that's the only major defect on the face. 

I had problems painting hair.  It was easy enough to create fine, wispy hair.  That only requires a lot of smudging.  But here, even though his hairline is receding, the hair in the back is still thick enough.  My husband pointed this out to me last night.  Just when I thought I was done.  So what I did was take a fan brush that was slightly damaged with the bristles all splayed every which way and dip one end in flesh tone and the other in the hair color.  I then painted hairs over and over and over.  I'd paint them, then blend them.  Paint and blend, paint and blend.  Then I made sure that I put those wispy hairs back in but only at the crown of his head.  I needed enough strands sticking out to convey hair, but not enough to make his military haircut sloppy looking.  

The background is not smooth for a reason.  I really wanted to do a sort of smudged, artsy feel with it.  I didn't want just a wash looking thing.  To do the background, I used a sponge brush and blotched white and brown paint everywhere, concentrating the darks to the edge and the whites toward the center.  Once I got my smudge fix, I let it dry for a few hours to thicken and I blended the smudges with a medium scruffy brush.  I like the background.  All I have left to do is wait for it to dry and varnish it.  After the varnishing, I'll find an awesome frame and it'll be my grandpa's birthday present in September.  I'm scared to give it to him, but I hope once I get the perfect frame, this trial and error of a painting will look decent.  

All in all, I learned a lot about oil colors through this painting.  It's best to get placement and separate the darks and lights right at the beginning.  Otherwise, problems arise later on and it's harder to correct mistakes.  Oils are all about layers.  I hope the next painting will be even better.  For now, I have to take a break from painting and focus on 2 drawings that others have ordered.  Moving on!