Week Four: Faces. Visual

This is the first portrait that I've ever actually completed. I've always, always given up, before. To do this portrait, I had to learn something--I had to learn that in fact, when doing portraits or acrylic paintings, I can't just slap the paint on the canvas in interesting ways the way I do with mixed-media collage. To get this far with a portrait--I've tried before and been so frustrated with how goopy things were--I actually got on the internet and found video tutorials on using acrylics. I tried different methods of blending color to get a skin tone. And then I sketched and layered on the color. I grew frustrated with my first attempt and re-distributed the color over the canvas. Then I liked the "burlap" textured affect that came up.

I don't think this turned out particularly well, but I had fun doing it, was glad that I pushed through the resistance, and felt like I learned some important things about doing more realistic renderings of a portrait when using acrylics.