Moving On, But There's Just One More thing

My Guy Steve, An oil  study in progress,
a person in progress too--just like the rest of us.

After spending a long lunch hour watching videos on to varnish or oil-out or both,  how to paint a portrait and  skin tones made easy, I went back to the studio with nothing serious in mind. I was still celebrating signing off on  the kids.  I meandered about and then started drawing  my three sons  on canvas, for the next portrait I have in mind. Then I  picked up the oil study I had started of my son, while still working on the kids; I had left him  looking pale and a bit sickly. The how to paint a portrait video had intrigued me as did the one on mixing skin tones. I decided to apply what I had picked up on Steve.

Meanwhile the babies look pretty cool framed up with a liner,
 I don't know about the gold bead; I think without.

As I painted more color into his cheeks, it occurred to me that portraiture is not that different from architectural designing . The genre demands the same analytically studies,  procedure planning and precision drawing, but with a brush instead of a pencil.  As tense as  my first portrait made me, the genre does suit my temperament, gets me excited and has meaning for other people.

As for when to varnish, if to varnish, and this other thing I'd never heard of, oiling-out, I've decided to oil-out in  three or four days. The different ratios of pigment to medium do make for an uneven surface. There's a settling down that occurs that needs to be brought up. I had watched a third video during lunch that intrigued me the most--since I thought I was done, but turns out not really.

The process of covering the whole canvas with a very thin layer of half oil medium and half mineral spirits to saturate the colors and even out the surface seems logical. The painting can then be varnished  later--only with a clear varnish-- four months to a year to almost never if Alizarine crimson was used in abundance. Varnishing also saturates the colors and does one thing more protective thing: it deters dust. I think dust is something to deter. A Swifter, used regularly,  couldn't possibly do good things to an oil painting. Watch this and tell me what you think. Right now, I thinking I should have used colored pencils? No chemistry to worry about there.