Nora Sallows: My Approach to Oil Portraits

I love to paint people. I always have. As a child of ten I would sit in front of the TV and practice drawing the actors until I could complete a pretty accurate portrait in under a half an hour. Although I have taken a few college level art classes most of what I know I have learned from art instruction books. Richard Schmid, Joe Singer, Emil Gruppe and Harley Brown are just a few of the many authors who have written wonderful books that I referred to often when I first began painting nine years ago. I don’t confine myself to painting portraits; I’m an avid plein air painter and I love to paint still life subjects and animals too.

The first thing I consider when I start a portrait is the lighting. I want a light source that defines the features and creates some drama. Clothing color is important and I always incorporate some of the clothing color into other areas of the piece to promote harmony. Most of my portraits are done with a limited palette, although I choose the colors based on the lighting, skin tones and clothing of the sitter. My standard palette is pretty basic: Titanium white, cadmium yellow light, cadmium yellow medium, cadmium red, terra rosa, rose madder, ultramarine blue, and pthalo blue. I often use other colors and switch some of these out just to experiment with new ones. I have about 30 different colors of oil paint and I enjoy playing with color. Color is the reason I paint. I am fascinated with how it works and affects other colors around it.

Sometimes I use a toned ground, other times I don’t. I prefer to paint on a linen ground but I like painting on an oil primed masonite board on occasion too. I begin by blocking in the shadows with a mixture of terra rosa and ultramarine blue, thinned with Liquin. Then I establish the lighter areas, using thick paint that is a shade or two lighter than what I want the final image to look like. I mix halftones from a mixture of the shadow color and the light color and add rose madder to the areas where the form turns. I keep the forms as simple as possible, adding detail in the areas I want to emphasize. In my portrait of Tim, who is dressed in a Samurai suit, I decided he needed to be painted in a way that would emphasize his innate toughness.

I think it’s important to know the background of your subject before you begin. Tim is an ex-Marine with a Black Belt in Karate and he attends a martial arts class where they actually practice Samurai sword fighting. I used bright red and orange colors in the background to create excitement. My black is a mixture of terra rosa and pthalo blue in the shadows and I simply added orange to create the color of his suit in the light. His eyes are shadowed so deeply I can’t tell what color they are—so I pay close attention to the value and shapes around them to get the likeness.

Gesture is just as important. The height and position of the subject’s shoulders can tell you a lot about them. Are they leaning forward? Is the head cocked to one side? Tim is in a Samarai pose, standing with his legs a shoulder length apart and holding his sword with both hands. His shoulders are broad and I use a big brush to create their shape but I don’t feel any detail in this are is necessary.

This painting is typical of my alla prima style of painting where I attempt to begin and finish a painting over a three hour period. I am not always satisfied with the result so I take a few photographs to use as reference in case I need to “clean up” the painting later when the model is no longer available. However, I’m very careful not to disturb the original shadow pattern that tells us with just a glance who the person is.

I want my portraits to make an emotional statement about the subject. I strive to present the “good qualities” I see in my subject. Everyone has good and bad features. I want my piece to be a nice painting as well as a good portrait so I look for compositional elements I can add and I don’t mind overlooking a few wrinkles to present the sitter in a better light. I think the most important thing an artist can do to improve their art is to work from life and severely limit the use of photographs in their work. Photos are a flat representation of reality and until you’ve painted from life you don’t realize how full of color human skin actually is..

Nora’s blog can be found here. Following are a few more of her portraits for your enjoyment: