| Author | Message | ||
  Grizrev Senior Member Username: Grizrev Post Number: 503 Registered: 8-2006 |
Eugene, as you may have noted from my other posts on capturing the personality in portraits, I agree that Kinstler places a higher priority on capturing the spirit of the sitter than on painting an exact physical likeness. I notice that most of his portraits bring out a softer, gentler, kinder spirit from his subject than often is conveyed by the sitter's actual appearance, at least in terms of what I have seen in photographs. Kinstler must be a kind optimist in terms of his view of human nature. Perhaps that's why he has been such a popular and prolific portrait painter! Am I digressing again into a philosophical or spiritual discussion, or is this comment related closely enough to the subject of this thread and to art? | ||
Eugene Senior Member Username: Eugene Post Number: 423 Registered: 8-2006 |
Rekha, i especially like Kinstler's brushwork, there's a sureness there, similar to Sargent. He seems to catch the spirit of the sitter, not just a likness | ||
Rekha Senior Member Username: Rekha Post Number: 427 Registered: 8-2006 |
Everett Raymond Kinstler’s watercolor ...He’s my favorite living portrait painter...Eugene I went to this artist's site and must admit I do not have your keen eye to tell the superiority of this artist's work. Would you elaborate on what about his portraits do you like | ||
Whitewatercolor Senior Member Username: Whitewatercolor Post Number: 310 Registered: 10-2006 |
Eugene, your painting of your father-in-law is filled with light and joy. I am amazed at both of your paintings and Joannas too. I've always heard that people were hard and I just haven't ventured there, but your guys are doing such wonderful, life-filled paintings, I guess I'll have to try. | ||
Joanna Advanced Member Username: Joanna Post Number: 137 Registered: 10-2006 |
The tight lips on the cornet players and the intense concentration of the eyes are so right. This is really a wonderful work. I'm imagining it gracing the pages of a future watercolor publication, I am. | ||
Joanna Advanced Member Username: Joanna Post Number: 136 Registered: 10-2006 |
Joe and Toph handle the idea of hard edges vs soft well in their tutorials in books. This is where I learned the "what" when I instinctively blur a line or let a wash merge into another. There is a lot of haze and glare on teeth and they are curved surfaces, so one can let the sparkle blur the teeth into a single mass, with variations of color. The first thing the portrait owner said was that this was her son's smile. So that made up for any deficits I found in my work. | ||
Grizrev Senior Member Username: Grizrev Post Number: 480 Registered: 8-2006 |
Eugene, You are a master at capturing the right expressions -- exactly the kind of thing Joanna said Kinstler missed in some of his portraits in her last post. Having played the trumpet myself, I can feel the strain of the lips and face in playing that high note! Absolutely great! Joanna, I agree about your good work on the teeth. Too many people try to separate the teeth with dark lines -- you let them merge with soft value separations. That's a better approach in my mind, though it might not satisfy photo realists. | ||
Joanna Advanced Member Username: Joanna Post Number: 135 Registered: 10-2006 |
Ok, I did go look up Kinstler, whose work I have seen of course. Didn't know it was him. 1. Yes, like Sargent. Most definitely influenced by JSS. 2. Some kind of stiffness about the portraits, and a miss on a few--one of Reagan missed the "look" somehow but he got it with the Western casual one, and the Natalie Jacobsen is off (I know because she's a familiar face to me.) 3. Something just misses the mark in all of them, but perhaps in real life, they have that "spark" I am not seeing here. Or perhaps the subjects are so posed (college prez, government official portraits) that they are just not what I like in art. | ||
Joanna Advanced Member Username: Joanna Post Number: 134 Registered: 10-2006 |
I gotta go see Kinstler's work. Eugene, thanks for the compliment. I found that teeth WERE the very devil, but decided that doing the gums (very evident in his photo) and his very white teeth would be better with some tricks I learned from dentists. --Teeth aren't white, so no paper white, and the eye teeth are usually a different color. I flattened the gum color to de-emphasize its prominence. And blued the back teeth to show shadow. Not satisfied, but ok with it all. Only HANDS are worse--yours came out great in the cornet players. | ||
Eugene Senior Member Username: Eugene Post Number: 421 Registered: 8-2006 |
I’ve found an article on Everett Raymond Kinstler’s watercolor portraits in an old issue of watercolor magazine. He’s my favorite living portrait painter, comparable to Sargent, in my eyes. Would I be infringing on copyright laws if I scanned and posted some of his work for discussion? | ||
Eugene Senior Member Username: Eugene Post Number: 420 Registered: 8-2006 |
Joanna. Great, you don't have to apologize for this one. I like the imaginative cropping and the colors. -- And the teeth which are the very devil to do. | ||
Joanna Advanced Member Username: Joanna Post Number: 133 Registered: 10-2006 |
Oh, well, here goes.  | ||
Joanna Advanced Member Username: Joanna Post Number: 132 Registered: 10-2006 |
Eugene, the RHYTHM in that painting (the red ties, the horns) is exciting. Love love love love it. I was going to post my portrait of my client's late son, but now I am feeling like a pianist at a Horowitz concert. | ||
Rekha Senior Member Username: Rekha Post Number: 418 Registered: 8-2006 |
no value sketch beforehand which affected how I applied paint, next time I will NOT omit this step... Eugene. You just answered the question I was going to ask: how do you work out the shadows and highlights from a photo? Thank you | ||
George Unregistered guest |
Beautiful! I love the composition. | ||
Eugene Senior Member Username: Eugene Post Number: 419 Registered: 8-2006 |
here it is----  | ||
Joanna Advanced Member Username: Joanna Post Number: 130 Registered: 10-2006 |
I did a portrait this month--they are scary and fun at the same time. I took a different compositional stance; I did a close up, so close, no hair, just face, eyes, mouth, only part of chin. The person who requested the portrait was very pleased. I did one boo-boo (no value sketch beforehand which affected how I applied paint, next time I will NOT omit this step) because I was very pressed for time. I will post it later. | ||
Eugene Senior Member Username: Eugene Post Number: 418 Registered: 8-2006 |
I'm almost finished with a second painting of the same man , but his time playing a cornet. I'm not used to doing portraits ,but I had so much fun with the first one, I tried another, more ambitious one. Want to make a few minor adjustments before I post it tomorrow. Thanks to Marie for suggesting Cad. red, Raw sienna, Burnt umber, with just a touch of blue where I wanted a little "cool". A good combination. With these colors I could build up multiple glazes without lifting or getting mud. | ||
Grizrev Senior Member Username: Grizrev Post Number: 447 Registered: 8-2006 |
Eugene, The portrait is wonderful -- not so much because of your paint choices, but because you (like Marie so often does) captured the personality, the visual expression of the inner person. It's something I noticed the copyists in the Louvre struggling to do with portraits, and very few accomplished in terms of the original painting. Most all had lovely paintings in terms of colors, some had been able to reconstruct the essential composition, but most missed the personality. Congratulations, my friend! I also love the way you let your background colors blend wet into wet!! Very effective. | ||
Joanna Advanced Member Username: Joanna Post Number: 109 Registered: 10-2006 |
Eugene, I adore the portrait. What a sensitive rendition and didn't the glasses work out just right. As to Elements, yes, it is all you need. Unless you do commercial printing, that is. I do reviews for Adobe, and the Elements is just fine for everything. The missing functions are the CMYK color scales used for telling print professionals how to make prints, and unless you are sending scans of your paintings to a professional printer, it's not needed. Even then, they have tools to do what you need, should you be making prints. I simply use Elements for visualization, but even at my "advanced" age, I grew up around computers and managed a software product for a while for a very large firm. So this is something I am familiar with. If you are not "au fait" with computers, Elements can be a bit daunting and needs several basic concepts to be grasped that apply to all graphics software. There are some great tutorials but it is an investment of time, figure at least 10-16 hours of work to get competent at it. There are tricks with handheld filters and other visual devices that can do the same thing (squinting, red filters) or just sketching with graphite to do value sketches that work as well. It's all what you are comfortable with. | ||
Marie Senior Member Username: Marie Post Number: 447 Registered: 8-2006 |
I like it, Eugene. What is important is that it will make your wife happy. I find it so difficult to work from a photograph. Photoshop is terrific. I understand that Photoshop Elements can do just about everything you can do in Photoshop, but I have never used it and so I can't say for sure what it will and won't do. I like iPhoto, too. Although it doesn't have as many features as Photoshop, I find it very useful. I usually do my first round of cleanup in iPhoto. When I want to do serious manipulation of a photo I turn to Photoshop. Have you tried iPhoto's tool for making books? I put together a hardbound book with pictures of my work for my mom at Christmas, and she was absolutely delighted with it. | ||
Eugene Senior Member Username: Eugene Post Number: 411 Registered: 8-2006 |
Here's the result, not the greatest, but I know my wife will like it, because it's a good likness. Guess I really should invest in photo shop. Do I need the cheaper ELEMENTS or do I go the whole way? I'm not very smart with computers and I don't want expensive software that I can't use. Presently I'm using only iphoto which came with my Mac OS X  | ||
Marie Senior Member Username: Marie Post Number: 446 Registered: 8-2006 |
That's a good suggestion about using the posterize function in Photoshop. I often convert a photo to grayscale and then posterize it with 3 or 4 levels to get a quick simplification of the values. | ||
Joanna Advanced Member Username: Joanna Post Number: 108 Registered: 10-2006 |
Sometimes I like to use Photoshop and the posterizing function (using 8 or more levels) to visualize a photo into a painting. Apparently I didn't invent this technique myself--I've found it also being used by others in art magazine articles. In the photo here, the glasses are almost the same value as the highligh on the cheekbone, so perhaps that could help. If it were me painting, I so agree with Marie. I would barely if at all do the lower part of the frame and I'd reduce the bright contrast. The problem with many photos is the heavy contrasty shadow. Our brain edits it out, but as you paint values, you see it. Sometimes I use the dodge function on Photoshop to lighten the contrast and reduce the shadow to "flatten" the photo. | ||
Marie Senior Member Username: Marie Post Number: 445 Registered: 8-2006 |
Glasses, in general, are easy to overwork. They have a lot of hard edges, and if you aren't careful to understate them then the viewer's eye will go straight to the glasses and not to the face. I try to look for places where I can blur glasses into similar values in the face. | ||
Rekha Senior Member Username: Rekha Post Number: 409 Registered: 8-2006 |
Marie, do you mean the lit lower half behind the glasses as the shadows? | ||
Marie Senior Member Username: Marie Post Number: 444 Registered: 8-2006 |
When I have time, I prefer to establish the whole flesh tone and then add the shadows. I try to vary the the value a bit in the lights. The standard raw sienna/cad red light combination should work well. Raw sienna would probably work better than yellow ochre. Rose and yellow work better for younger folks. I would keep a good bit of raw sienna/cad red light in the shadows, and then I would add probably some burnt umber and a cool. I'm not sure which cool -- I might play with several until I get something I like. Also, be careful about the glasses. It's easy to overdo them. -- and I would not do the shadows cast by the glasses. I would also be careful about the cast shadow that goes from his nose to under his mouth. I think it confuses the form somewhat. | ||
Eugene Senior Member Username: Eugene Post Number: 410 Registered: 8-2006 |
I found this photo of my deceased father-in-law, and would like to do a small watercolor of him to surprise my wife on valentine day. Only 7x5. I seldom paint flesh and need advice on color or any other help you can give. Do I do the shadow areas first and then glaze the whole thing with a light flesh tone or do I just paint from light to dark? Marie, you're so good with figures--what colors would you use? here's the referece photo  |
