Redoing and Old Painting

Since I’ve been in quarantine for so long, I was looking through some older paintings and found one that I’ve been wanting to redo for a while. I did this painting in a class last year, I used the zorn palette and it just didn’t go well. The proportions were wrong from continually mushing paint around and its been bothering me since I turned it in last year.

I started by re-griding the painting to re-establish the proportions. I drew over top of the painting since you can’t use acrylic gesso on top of oil paint (which is super annoying). I decided to go with black and white since I thought it fit the image a lot better than color. Here’s the grided canvas:

I spent a few days just layering paint, I don’t usually paint this way. I always work on an area until it’s perfect and then move on. This time I decided to try layering. I really struggled with the lighting the last time I painted this piece, so layering helped a lot this time around. Here are few process shots:

Gradually the painting changed as I kept adding on layers. I kept reworking the face, which always leads to the proportions getting changed. I had to keep going back and fixing this, this painting was a lot harder than I thought. Even a year later I was still struggling with it. Here are some more process shots:

Once I got the background in and felt a little better about the painting, I could see more of the color ranges and was able to adjust some of the values in the face again. I also added in some minor details, like the stitching on the jacket and began to add in the lens flares in the background. I felt like they gave the painting a more dynamic feel, the black background seemed like too much of an empty void.

Here is the finished piece, I’m still not entirely happy with it, but it was really good practice. I only spent about 5 days on it, so I hope to do some more while we're all stuck in quarantine!