The lost painting

 Today's post is about a painting I had left in our old apartment while moving out. I did not realize it until a few months later.

 

 While we were living in Tampere , it was the peak of winter and we couldn't go anywhere because of the snow. So, I took to painting. Acrylics have always been a favourite medium for me.

 I started off with this pre primed stretched canvas. I wanted to paint a face, but I had never done it before. Took me a couple of hours to finish this one.

 I started off with tracing out the outline of the face on the canvas, I filled the face with the flesh tint that I mixed (I do not use ready made flesh tints). I used a combination of, white, cadmium yellow, cadmium red, and raw umber for the base colour. MY brush strokes normally don't go in one direction, but this painting required that I run the brush in the shape of the face. Pretty much like applying make up . Once the base coat dried, I mixed a smidgeon of prussian blue in the flesh tint and dabbed wherever the shadows were required (The neck, chin etc)

 Next I painted the lips in a combination of cadmium red and white. Instead of shading the lips, I created an outline with cadmium red, which created an illusion of shading.

 Now the eyes were the most difficult part to paint. The base coat, though looks like it, is not white. It is white with a slight mix of gray. Once the base coat dried, I painted the pupil and the iris with two shades of gray, lighter on the outside, darker on the inside and a dab of the lighter shade on the center. I drew the eyelashes with the tip of a  fan brush and used the same strokes I would use while applying mascara.

Before I painted the hair, I wanted to paint the background as it would be difficult to paint the background after details are in. I painted a gradient of blue and green as the background. Not much care was given to the brush strokes.

 After the background dried, I started painting the hair. I wanted the hair to reflect the coor of the skin and did not want it to look artificially black, So I mixed a little dark brown in what remained of the flesh tone. I wanted the hair to have a flyaway look, so the strokes went down from the top of the head and outward. I did not measure the placement of the eyebrow properly , hence the surprised expression :).

 Finally, I ended the whole thing with a Yellow/blue/ brown frame to highlight the face and some jewelery in the colors of the background.