"Herb Vendor" oil on linen panel, 8" x 10"
Another exciting morning! Today I tackled something else I have yet to paint in oil . . .the human face. Everything I do in the studio I regard as an experiment . . .another challenge to advance the learning.
This gent is an herb vendor we came accross last summer in Eymet, France at their weekly open market in the village square. I have a gallery of similar rascals that I may attempt.
Using the big size 12 flat first to block in the whole piece I found myself humming and singing as I slopped thin paint around in the shadows first then the light. That lesson that came ringing in a few weeks ago, plus what I learned yesterday in "Perigord Pasture" just seem to fit together and make this process seem easy. The cool thing about oil is that one doesn't need to be too worried about mistakes and errors because one can scrape and re-do all day long till it is right. And the opacity of the paint makes it easy to carve out shapes as one progresses into the finer parts of the painting.
(In looking at this photo on two different monitors, I can see huge differences in what is actual and what the monitors do to murder the intensity of the colors . . .or to press contrast to such an extent that the image makes no sense. Does anyone out there know how to adjust the contrast on the new hi res monitors in MS Vista?)
Some of this stuff is actually beginning to make sense!