DANE-week 5

The past few weeks I have been demonstrating different aspects of portrait anatomy in clay.  Most of the demonstrations have been about 15-20 minutes where I talk about the simple structure of the head, features and hair.  This is the sculpture as it left the classroom.  This clay is now in my studio, where I will work on it and finish it in the next few weeks.  Please check back to view the process.  I may slip in a few paintings as I go. 

Forest Painting with palette knife

This is a demonstration of palette knife painting.  The first step was a block-in with Dioxine purple capturing simple values.
Next, I started with the background and applied the paint with a combination of brush and knife , blending to make it soft edged. Notice the whites in the lights.  Normally I don't put whites in this early, but I wanted to do the background first because of all the trees and leaves in the foreground.  Also, it felt good.
 Then I painted  the darks of the tree trunks in the foreground and some golden colors to get the feel of the trees.
Added more darks of the foreground.  I wasn't happy with the background yellows so added more orange and I used my fingers to blend the back ground.  Notice the strokes in the road were smoothed out.  I could have gone either way with this, but chose to smooth out the brushstroke for variety.
This is  as far as I got in class.  I hope to finish it on Tuesday by detailing a few areas.  See you then.