When I'm working on a painting, I can paint up to 50 layers sometimes. After many translucent glazes, eventually you can start to lose some of the important details you drew in the sketching process.
"Portrait of a Gulf War Veteran," 16 x 20, Acrylic on Canvas
In this video (about 8 minutes), I am going to show you how I define certain areas so that in a portrait especially, I preserve the details. This way, I make sure the painting looks like the person I'm trying to portray.
(I am still going step-by-step through this military portrait of the man who served in the gulf war.)
And now, here's the video...
[Gulf War Veteran Portrait Step 4] (
Finally, here is a question someone just emailed me, along with my reply back to him. I can take for granted the fact that I have been painting for over 20 years, so I always appreciate a question that reminds me to make sure to teach EVERYTHING I know.
Q: Hello, thank you for your kindness. I very much appreciate your effort. I would like to ask about your glazing: do you wait until each layer has dried before adding the next one ?
A: Yes, I do wait--always--until the layer has dried. If I don't, the new layer will begin to disturb the previous one, and you will get lumpy paint in areas that just looks terrible. What I do is move around to different areas--such as the background, hair, face, clothing, etc, so that the paint is always dry before I begin a new layer.
But you can always use a hair dryer to accelerate the process if you're impatient (as I sometimes am :) You may need to do that in the first layers, when you apply thicker amounts, because you're using a larger brush, and so it takes longer to dry.
If you have any questions on any of the techniques shown in this video, or anything else comes to mind, just let me know!
Enjoy your painting and God bless,
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