portrait

Drawings of Caravvagio paintings

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After seeing the Caravaggio and His Times Exhibit in Rome last week I did some rough-ish drawings of some of his paintings in conte crayon. The man certainly could draw very well in the manner of his day. That did not make him unusual as an artist for that time. Rather it was his perfecting the dramatic use of lighting in his paintings.

caravaggio boy bitten
From Boy Bitten by Lizard
lute sm
from The Musicians
caravaggio figures
St Francis of Assissi in Ecstasy
caravaggio bachus
From Bacchus

Portrait of a Teenage Girl

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Sold Acrylics on paper, 60 x 80 cm

I did this portrait following as closely as I could Rembrandt’s approach to portrait painting.   However he used oil paints and I use acrylics.  Blending with acrylics is problematic as they dry so quickly so you have to paint afresh where planes join, although retarders help.  His models were in person whereas I use photos, as do most of us given the hours and hours it takes to paint a portrait.  Some do a combination of a sitting during which they take photos and work from them later.  In the British national portrait competition they had a model  and all the artists worked from photos while the sitter could move around freely and talk to the interviewer.  Not all photos are professionally done so the lighting is not easy to deal with, as was the case with the photo I used here.  The subject was in a snow scene, cheeks red here and there from the cold and hardly any shadows from the diffuse lighting.