This is my first experiment of doing a portrait of my Grandad in acrylic paint.. I started off by sketching out a measured grid of the original photo of him, therefore I knew I would get accuracy in proportion and size of his facial features.
Using the grid as a guide was also useful as it allowed me to figure out and guided me on where to place certain shadows, the lighter areas as well as where the creases exactly are in the t shirt.
After making major progress on the portrait, I reassessed what I had done so far. When looking back on the original photograph, I noticed that I had started painting what I thought would look right, instead of looking at the correct placement of things such as the neck. I added a darker shade under the neck, which gives the illusion of my Grandad's neck to be a lot longer and slimmer than it looks in the photo. Furthermore, I found that I was using the wrong colour palette of shades, the wrinkle lines along the forehead have been painted on way to dark. In the original photo, my Grandad's skin is overall more red toned, however I noticed when taking a step back and looking at the painting I had mainly used brown toned shades instead, which does not look real skin-like at all. Once reassessing, and before making more progress on this painting, I decided to restart this portrait, however this time be more cautious of what shades I am using.
I started this painting once again - using the grid for guidance of the outline of the portrait, making sure the proportions of the facial features were accurate, however this time I erased the lines once I had the outline complete, this is because when looking back at the other portrait I attempted to do, I noticed that you could see the guide lines through the paint once it had dried. Also, as you can see in the photograph I have used a completely different combination of skin tone shades, which are a lot more red/orange toned instead of brown. On the forehead I added a lot more highlights in the centre, as there were in the photo. Once I added those highlights, I automatically noticed the painting looked more three dimensional.
To make mix the different shades and make sure they're all within the same colour palette, I made sure I was happy with the main skin colour of the face I was using, then once I had that correct, to create shadows I added a tiny bit of brown paint to that colour, and to create highlights I added a certain amount of white, depending on how light I wanted the highlighted areas to be. In the last painting I created of my Grandad, I noticed that I layered the skin tones once they had dried, as well as the shadows, which did not look realistic as they weren't blended with the other skin tones on the face. The shadows I created on the top of the forehead in the previous painting looks too brown toned and looks quite 'muddy'. I learnt from this, therefore in this painting I fully focused on one area of the face at a time, meaning that the paint would be more blended and seamless (which is more realistic) as it is still wet and moveable.
This is the final outcome of the portrait of my grandad, for the cutting out process, I did the same as I did for the portrait of my brother. In the background of the original photograph, in the left corner there was a tartan-like print umbrella. I decided to make it black instead, due to the fact that I wanted the main focus to be the portrait, not the background and I found that the umbrella would be a distraction, and would also make the painting very busy. For the flowers on my grandads portrait, I used more dual colours for the flowers to make them look like they were decaying. The flowers represent that he was once full of life, however is also starting to decay as he gets older. The colourful use of flowers represent his personality, he may seem quite and a little shy to people who don’t personally know him, but once you know him, you know that on the inside he is a beautiful person.