What a Winter!

I love painting outside when there is snow and this winter is driving me to distraction.  All this snow for so long and it is too cold to paint outdoors.  I switched to oils because watercolours froze and this winter it has been so cold that oil paint gets to be about the consistency of play-do.

The up side is that I am spending more time working on portraits.  Last week in class I did a pastel sketch of Kim so this week I took my oils.  I have been struggling with pigment selection and getting the forms correct so I decided to work the same way as I do for landscapes.  I toned the whole panel with yellow ocher and then added some darks and rubbed off the lights until I had a decent value study.  I then started adding colour.  This still has a long way to go but I am excited about the start.  The background, her hair, eyebrows shirt etc. are all still the under painting.

I need to get outside.  I am actually debating painting the view from my studio window.  Yikes!