Date 9.01.02

The Sun news paper has asked for anyone of their readers to paint a portrait of the Queen to celebrate her Golden Jubilee.

Here is the start of my Portrait of the Queen, I'm painting in oils.

With a canvas board stained and using a small soft brush I start to draw loosely the image with a mix of burn umber, yellow ochre and paint medium. It is much better to paint from life than from a picture.

Scroll down for more stages

Now I start to add  shadow and colour to help in forming the image. Colours used are white cadmium red, yellow ocher, burn umber and paynes gray.

I am happy with most of the image but something is not quite right but with oils you can change the image at the next stage.

I'll leave this stage dry for a few days.

Finding a good image of the Queen face on has proved difficult, I'm trying to achieve an image of our Queen as she may look now, I believe her hair maybe a bit lighter how ever I feel adjustment can be made at the final stages of this portrait.

Painting a portrait from a single photo is awkward but from several photo's is complicated.

A portrait from life would produce a more richly enhanced painting.

Painting the hair

Sorry about the poor quality of the photo.

Trying to paint a female never mind our Queen, you are walking on thin ice. 

I  concentrated on the multitude of colour you find in the flesh tones of the face, we have whites, reds, pinks, browns, greens, blues and so on, all of them are forming shapes within the image and are blended so you flow from one to the other without really noticing.

Here I've painted most of the left side of the face I'm very pleased with the result of the portrait so far.

More to come next week.

The portrait looks completed but I'm not quite there yet. The image is looking great but I feel that the mouth area is slightly wrong.

When I have such a problem I leave the image for a few days and then take a fresh look, that normally helps to find what needs altering and as I said earlier with oils paints one can change things.

More next week

I think we have a finished portrait here I'm almost happy with the out come and almost is as good as it gets with me.  When I paint a painting that I'm perfectly happy with is the time for me to pack my brushes away.

Hope the queen has a chance to view my attempt to paint her image and likes what she see's.

bye for now Gary

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