A new friend may have the painting obsession particularly the self portrait variant. Reason and threats couldn’t inoculate her, so I am welcoming her to this affliction with this posting of how I’m doing it. I paint a new selfie every 6 months or so.
If you look back in this blog Dear Reader, you’ll see various attempts at self portraits. Reading through these brain farts you should learn a little about the important parts of creating a painting.
Composition of a self portrait is usually very straightforward a head shot focusing on the face triangle over a background complimentary to the primary colors of the composition. The goal is to demonstrate the artist’s mastery of their particular style and to show the life if the artist through this style; to express the emotion or psychological state of the artist. This photo, on the left, is the same view I used from the mirror. I prefer live painting, alla prima, to capture the moment and use the studio to finish the layering.
My technique is an offshoot of watercolor painting. It is called dry brush painting. Its history and antecedents are interesting; in a later post I will share that research with you. Suffice it to say that I use very little water, about four ounces per session. I dampen the dried pigment with a few drops of water and use this slurry to mix the color that I will place on the ground. I paint with brushes that are sized as 0 and 1, my smallest is a 10/0. (At a later date, I’ll post about brushes. If you need to know, right now, buy the best sable brush you can afford.)
The steps for applying pigment are: make the slurry, move it to the mixing area, blend your colors (making sure to clean your brush each time you pick up a color), clean your brush, pick up the color you choose, tap it on a towel to dry it and apply the stroke to the ground. The pigment you pick up should be liquid enough to create the stroke and dry enough to dry on contact with the ground, virtually the same technique as egg tempera. 
I noticed that when I attend open sessions my final alla prima paintings are muddy. There I’m using a number 7 sable and working wetter than I usually do on thinner, 140#, paper. I figured that changing my ground might make my painting more radiant. That and creating this post is the motivation for this particular painting.
My first step is to roughly draw the subject on the ground in pencil. After fiddling around way too long with various pencils from 8B to 7H, a number 2 Ticonderoga works great. I do this to get the bits and pieces in the right place. Some artists, all of them oil painters, apply a toned background on the canvas and draw using a neutral color, usually Burnt Umber to get the drawing of the subject. I haven’t developed a technique for this. Remember, watercolor dries on contact with the ground and does not stay alive, workable, like oil. Further, drying and re-wetting the pigment blends them together creating a color that at this stage of my development turns more to mud than radiance. However, John Singer Sargent and Andrew Wyeth did not use a pencil in their watercolors, so there is a way to o this if one is willing to commit the time to explore it. Regardless, the lesson to pick up at this stage is to draw the picture accurately before you start painting.
With the drawing in the position I wanted on the ground, I woke up the ground with a light wash of color. Sir Russell Flint used a soft white so the pencil showed through, Sargent went right to the background colors with washes and “pulled the figure” from the wash. In this painting I used a verdaccio, an under painting of Green Earth. I’ve found that underpainting with a pigment creates a radiance that adds to the final presentation. Verdaccios and grisaille are techniques that are truly time tested.
Where to begin, I mix my palette of flesh tones using the Zorn limited palette. Being a simpleton, I can figure out a grayscale of 5 to 7 steps and a mixture of Vermilion, Yellow Ocher either individually or blended. Vermilion and black produces the brown, Yellow Ocher and white produces the highlights.
It is worthwhile to note that the shibboleth of using transparent watercolor pigment so that the light shines through the pigment and bounces off the white background producing a glow is BS. Transparent watercolor allows for careful layering of thin applications of pigment either a wash, very thin application, or as a dry brush to create depth. Each of my pigments including my black, think about that, is transparent. So there!
A second popularly held belief, that when painting in watercolor “once you’re down you’re down,” is an error. With a stiff brush you can scrub an area erasing or lightening the area. If you get up close and personal with Wyeth’s painting you’ll notice areas scrubbed and gouged out where he “erased” the color. There’s a technique using bleach to re-whiten the area, but I do not have the fortitude to try it. I prefer to use a good ground, the better the ground the easier it is to move the pigment around. If you work on paper the scrubbing can if it is too vigorous fuzz up and dig through the paper.
The finished self portrait is above. Particularly striking, other than the physical beauty of the model, is the brush work around the eyes. Using a 10/0 brush to create the tiny lines in the old skin works well. My current series in the studio, Dyad, is micro landscapes where I’m developing this technique. The palette and brushwork create both a radiance and dimensionality that I enjoy.
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