Contour Progress

I felt the need of a larger blow up of the head and hand.  Here's where a
 sophisticated photo editing program would have come in handy.

After years of concentrating on the shape of the positive and negative forms when drawing, contour lines feel  strange, austere, missing something.  What you see took about three hours including scaling the enlarged head photo to match the smaller scaled reference of the whole image.  This step is where all those years of architectural drawing paid off. I kept subdividing the grid squares to get lines more accurate. I was aware of where the grid could go awry. The last few years of drawing and painting with no preliminary drawing kept butting in to make me want to sketch.  I worked all afternoon trying to keep that urge in check.

--Not to worry, I will not keep posting the accomplishments of each day. I do plan on working in some gestural heads to keep life interesting and my eye/hand sharp.  Friday is a drop in painting studio.  I am planning to attend, but I plan to draw, not paint.  The models are clothed.  I need more work on drapery type items than I do on nude figures; I find those boring after so many classes way back when.

This was my first portrait and first oil painting--the one that started all of my research.
I used a grid system for the initial drawing with paint. From there, I went directly into color.
There was no grisaille, monochromatic underpainting. I was my loose self on the background blanket.
The client provided the reference photograph, which was taken by a professional photographer.
This was done in February, 2012.