Oil Painting " The selfie icon"~ michellechoongkhoo

Ready for signoff, framing and hanging up in our hall of love !

How did we get here? 

stage 1 : using water mixable oils to map out the tonal values :

                      

     

stage 2: slowly adding  thin layers of oils using linseed medium

  

More art lessons or continue with self learning~ michellechoongkhoo

Recently, my arty farty MIA classmate, invited me to join into a class on portraiture.
I was so tempted but alas timing clashes.
And truthfully the prospect of weekdays morning to rush into KL's CBD district does sound sane to retired slack souls !

So I guess I shall resort back to plodding along, trial and error and referencing from other artists .
Thus it was that Jon's eye catching selfie shot caught my eye...
As they say, good art starts with fab good stills.
Aha,  this dramatic photo in my opinion fits the bill!

Oil painting is definitely not my first love. 

As I plodded along I started to remember why I always defer starting on oils and why there's all those incomplete pieces sitting in the archive box! 

But as with any labor of love, the special meaning of the piece kept me focused and determined to complete this one! 

It is going to be a long process.... 

Stay tuned 

Oil Lesson 5: Using a Painting knife

I thought it might be a tad boring but it wasnt , not the least bit~

As a matter of fact I did enjoy the lesson thoroughly today….it reminded me of doing the sugar icing for cakes ;)

And well, I am no baker….in fact I suck big time at anything to do with cooking so it was daunting to try to use the painting knives at first.

Definitely the first stroke was the toughest.

Ms Shia showed me how to practise on my palette, after which yea, I did loosen up and soon was gleefully plying the paints liberally.

As usual, one starts with the darkest shades and Ms Shia said it was important to paint the eyes so as to get a firm anchor for the other locations…she was as usual right, of course! As soon as the eyes and nose, ears were in place, the rest came easy enough.

Luckily I had bought so many different types of painting knives….

Applying the paint thickly requires a large or medium trowel shaped knife; to get the illusion of fur, I found it best to use the small paddle shaped knife and for the outline of eyes, I prefer to use a small diamond shape knife but here I must admit that alas for Tobie's beautiful pupil, I had to cheat by using a brush !

At first my Tobie looked like a street cat until Ms Shia told me to fatten her up by making the head rounder and the eyes much much bigger. Wow, it works.

The magic touch was the whiskers….it pays to ensure that the paint beneath the whiskers are of darker shade and also not flowing in the same direction as the whiskers…such simple adjustments and I have my beautiful Tobie looking right back at me from my round canvas….

Mmmm, cant wait to finish the other two canvasses of Roxy and Tiger when I come back from diving the Maldives ~

P/S:

Some of you may have been wondering whether water mixable oils are of any good….Well, for this painting I prepared the background 3 days ago with a combo of sap green and viridian hue from Reeves water mixable oil colors (box set of 12 tubes x 1.2ml for only RM $22.50 , just about USD7….what a bargain).

I know that I will use it often for backgrounds because it has proven to be very economical as well as efficient , looks good and dries super fast…