Good hair day

I know I'm not good at portraits. I also know that I'm not too good with oil paints. So why I combined the two, I don't know.

I used painting knives instead of paintbrushes because I wanted to experiment with creating texture this time around. I spent a lot time on her hair, where all the texture was. I started to paint her face and upper body with a knife as well but it wasn't translating well. By the time I decided to use paintbrushes, the paint already began to solidify and so the textures have stuck. I'm not too fussed, we'll call it 'character'. Anyway, I'm not going to pretend that this was going to turn out like a portrait from an Old Master. It was just me moving a load of thick paint on the paper.

Bumpy...

Illustration Friday: swell

 Water, water, everywhere:

 (oil paint, A3-ish)

I thought I'd break out the oil paints and try to paint water. This photo came out a little bit too bright though. The paint was still wet when I snapped it (I stopped painting about 10 minutes ago) and the wet paint reflected some light in a few odd places. I still need to fix some parts, like the background water and especially the breaking wave which, for some strange reason keeps coming out square every time I paint it, but I thought I might as well post now. After all there are only a couple more days until this week's topic is done.

I'm also determined to actually finish this rather than call it a WIP and then forget about it like I did with my first few oil paint attempts. Hooray for me.


(Only after I chose my "water water" intro line did I decide to look it up and find out that it is actually a line from a poem called "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". I didn't even know the poem existed until now. Hmm, you really do learn something new every day. Thanks for that, Google.)

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Update, 17th August:
Photos don't seem to do the painting justice. Either the colours are wrong, light is reflecting off it and creating different effects, or there isn't enough light (damn you, English summers!) My first photo (up there) included a few details that aren't actually in the painting but enhanced the image somewhat. So I painted in some of those artifacts and, thanks to a great tip in the comments section I repainted the breaking wave to look less square. I changed the background water as it was too busy and repetitive and the shade of blue right in the distance seemed artificial. This is how my painting looks a day later. I retouched it slightly in Photoshop to get the colour levels as close as I could to the original painting.

It's getting there.
I plan to repaint the sky next. The blue doesn't feel right.