Posing the Model to Paint a Portrait
Hi, I’m Alex Shundi, and this is How To Paint A Portrait. In this clip, I’m gonna show you how to place a model, how to pose her, and the best way to do it is to get a just a very normal, very simple light of about 75 to a hundred watts and place it about three and a half to five feet away from the figure. The reason why you wanna do that is because when you work in two dimension which is what a canvass is, it’s flat, you wanna take the actual form and give it a lot of difference between the light and the dark. That, translated on to the canvass will give us the idea of three dimensionality and roundness. So, I’m gonna put the light on, and as I do you’ll see that suddenly her face becomes more dimensional. Now that means that this part is lit, this part is in dark. If I were not to do that, and keep the face in relatively even light, then what happens is that as I translate that to a flat surface, you’ll just get a shape but not a form. Okay, what I’m gonna do now is take her face and put her on a three quarter view just like that. So fundamentally this is what I would look at as I paint her in the canvass. Reason why I’m doing that is because if you do something on a profile, then literally half of our face is long. Whereas if you’re doing your absolutely head on, say like this, then you would have very little definition as to what the personality of her curves in the faces are. Therefore, I’m gonna put her three quarters, traditionally in our history, that the vast majority of paintings are done on a three quarter view. Alright, that looks great. Now, in the next clip, I’m gonna show you how to place this image on a canvass.