In-Depth post 4

This week’s skills from How To Have A Beautiful Mind is listening and questioning. Because I don’t meet with my mentor in person, being an active listener is difficult. One of the best ways to show you are listening is to look at the speaker and nod when they say something you agree with. I couldn’t do this because I called my mentor, so I was unable to show I was listening. To get around this, I decided I would use the lessons from this week’s second section on listening.

I started my call by saying “Hi. I was wondering if you have any advice about how to paint hair?” After I said it, I realized it was a shooting question, instead of a fishing question. My mentor interpreted it differently than I expected. He said “What kind of hair? Cat? Dog? Monkey?”. I had just assumed he understood I was asking about how to paint human hair, but he didn’t. A better way I could have phrased this question is “What advice do you have about painting human hair? I really struggled with it while trying my paintings this week.”. This is a far more precise and directed fishing question, I also explain why I am asking the question. My mentor told me he would give me an assignment with hair once I finished my current assignment.

The conversation then moved to my most recent painting. The painting of the bald man. I had sent my mentor an email of the painting when I finished it.  My mentor printed out the picture and made some quick corrections to show me some of the things I could improve. He also made a little list of all the changes he made and sent the picture back to me.

Because I didn’t know why the changes had been made, I asked him questions about each of the changes. I started by asking why he straightened the lower eye lid. He said “The lower eye lid is usually straight because when you think about it, the upper eye lid is the on that moves the most. That is why you paint the upper eye lid with more of a curve in it.”. This question was far better because precise and open ended. That is why he didn’t need to respond to my question with a question.

He moved continued to explain some of the other changes he made. He told me that instead of painting individual eye lashes, I should just add a colour to the upper lid. He said “Painting individual eye lashes makes the painting look silly and unpolished, unless it is very zoomed in. Painting only a line of colour makes it look like it was painted by an artist.”. I responded with “If you only do a strip of colour, why do you only do it on the upper eye lid? Why not the lower eye lid?”. He said, “When you look at people you only really notice their upper eye lashes, so you only paint eyelashes on the upper lid.”.

Next, we moved on to the shadows of the face. My mentor said, “I noticed your painting didn’t really have any shadows.” I was impatient and thought it was my turn to speak, so I said, “That is because my reference picture didn’t have any major shadows.”. Right as I said that, he started to explain how shadows really show off the shape of the face. Right away, I said, “Sorry.”. He continued to explain how shadows and highlights are key components of a portrait and that they show different shapes of the face. I told him that my reference didn’t have any shadows. He said, “If the picture you are using doesn’t have any major shadows you can do two things. You can either over excaudate the highlights and lowlights, or you can add your own light source.”. In response I said, “Are you saying that I can that to add a different light source to show more depth in my paintings?”. And he “Yes.”. This made me realize that I was the one who was doing the painting, so I got to decide how everything looked.

Overall, my meeting with my mentor this week was quite educational. It really helped me to understand some of the techniques behind portrait painting and practice asking fishing and shooting questions.

This week my mentor had me practicing portrait painting. That is why you won’t see landscapes this week.

The first painting did this week was following a guide I found online. The only problem I had while doing this painting is, I ran out of titanium white. This made mixing skin tones quite difficult because to get highlights you need to use white. After a while, my painting started to look nothing like the guide. So, I stopped following it and put some blood near her mouth and some rough brush work for hair. I wasn’t happy with this painting when I finished it, but since then it has grown on me.

The next painting, I didn’t turn out as well. I only put an ear on one side of the head and the hair looks more like a brown blob. The eyes are also very strange. I swear they follow me when I walk across the room. Because of how poorly I did this painting, I decided to make a do over piece before starting the next assignment my mentor had given me.

I was far happier with how this portrait turned out. You could see different dimensions of the face and the eyes didn’t follow you across the room. The small highlights I made on the eyes and glasses are small details, but make the piece look far better. My poorly complaints about this painting are that the eyes don’t line up and that I didn’t give him ears.

Overall, I think I have improved a lot this week with painting skin tones and showing different dimensions of the face. If you have any comments please feel free to leave them below.

Have a great day!

Skip to toolbar