Adrian Clamp - Portrait in Mixed Media

Photo with grid

To see a range of works by Adrian Clamp visit his website http://www.adrianclamp.webs.com/

Adrian showed us how to paint a portrait from a photograph using acrylic paint initially and then adding some oil pastel over the top. He worked on paper which had previously been given a coat of cream emulsion paint so he wasn't working on a bright white surface. He had selected the area of interest in the photo and overlayed it with a grid that was used for scaling up.

The grid on the paper

To scale up he draws a vertical line, with a charcoal pencil, onto his paper where the left side of the painting will be and a horizontal line to mark the top. With the top left corner of the grid aligned with the intersection of these two lines, he draws a diagonal at the same angle as the grid for the photo. The other two sides of the rectangle to contain the
painting can now be drawn in. They will meet at some point on the diagonal. The other elements of the grid can now be drawn.

Using the grid as a scaling guide he added marks with paint to indicate the location of some of the key facial features and began his underpainting.

 His palette was arranges with warm colours on one side and cooler colours on the other. They pigments are arranged around the edge of a large plastic serving plate. There was also a generous pool of white paint.

He recommends producing a chart for two colour mixing.














The images below show how the painting progressed

Oil pastel has been added