Sue Linton Artist: Cec's portrait continued- acrylic underpainting finished

I'm now starting to finish the rest of the under painting his shirt and background. I wanted a light background as I think of Cec and the Samaritan's as a beacon of hope for a lot of people.

I also wanted to to set the scene by including the Samaritan logo or a suggestion of it .

Shirt roughly started , logo in place , background shade done..

Now to start doing the Oil colour over the top.

After spending so long getting his face pretty accurate I decided to have a play doing his shirt and the background first before ruining the lovely facial underpainting...lol's

I want Cec's expression and character to be the most important thing in the portrait.

I knew I wouldn't be able to play around much with his features so I had some fun suggesting his shirt! I didn't want it too tight with every detail spelled out, rather that people should get the general impression.

I had fun with his shirt! I'm very happy with it at the moment.

I don't want to get bogged down in detail and end up with it being boring.

Now to see how the background colour I had planned looks. This will affect how I do his face colour so best to do it first.

Argh! Now the scary part..It always looks worse before it comes good and I hated to wreck that underpainting.

Oh well I plunged straight in - it can't get any worse now so stop worrying!

Above- The ugly stage.. laying in some broad colours / tones as a base. I don't want his teeth to be the focus so I'll play them down later. I want your attention to go to his eyes and expression.

At least all his face is now covered so I can compare tones and colours. I haven't got a likeness yet and there will be a lot of back and forth and fine tuning before I'm satisfied! I'm playing around with colours..

All roughly covered now to continue with his face.

I was hoping to use quite a few colours but

The reference photo was taken in flat lighting with his face in the shade. That made it very difficult as I found if I increased the contrast things just didn't look right!

I had my life portraits next to the portrait as I had hoped to keep it more painterly like them. They all have spotlights on the model which gives you much more scope for impact and colour.

If I do an entry for next years exhibition I'll use more dramatic lighting.

Having said that a more conservative style used with this portrait suited the calm kind feel I wanted to achieve.

Above - This is one of the stages where I decided to add some orange / green colours for some more zap in Cec's face. I found the colours just didn't sit right with the rest of the portrait and his complexion looked a bit green.

I chased my tail a lot with this portrait and ended up just staying with pink, red colours and upping the highlights as much as I could.

About this time I realised his chin needed to be moved over more to the right. Argh!

Not a good time for major surgery..lol's

Here I've gone back to more pinkish colours and the portrait is holding together better.

I made a lot of changes but you probably can't see them in a photo. His head was too high so I chopped off a bit of height , made his neck thinner on the LHS, changed eye and nose shapes subtly and played with the highlights. Getting there..I also lightened his eye colour and added some extra zap.