Below I have marked up two details of my portraits to show the different ways you can use edges to manipulate the viewer to see what you want him to see. The first is a pencil drawing and second is an oil painting. In the pencil drawing I wanted to emphasize the man’s grin and de-emphasize his bad hairline (what a rotten comb-over it was). In the second I want the nose and eyes to grab the viewer. Notice how the lines around these features are sharper than those around the mouth.

Thanks for the comments, Eileen and Cathleen. Maybe everyone already knows all this stuff so they don’t want to try the first challenge I posted. C’mon you guys…. take a crack at the ballet dancer or the little girl- they need some hair!!!

Anyway… here is the second part of the lesson, which is all about a part of portraits that I have always found difficult—BACKGROUNDS!!! I hope this is helping someone- let me know if not and i’ll try to answer questions.

BACKGROUNDS IN A PORTRAIT
Backgrounds can add excitement to your portrait or they can ruin it. Personally, I have a hard time deciding on a background color after the person is already painted in. it’s usually much easier to make this decision before you begin, then you can at least integrate your subject into the background by using some of the same color mixtures. For example, if you have a green color on your palette that you have used for your subject’s shirt don’t mix an entirely new green to paint a plant in the background. Use the same green hue, but “lighten” the shade and add this lighter color somewhere in the background. Backgrounds are lighter than foregrounds and they have less contrast due to atmosphere. Your background colors should never be brighter than the brightest bright on your subject. Why? Because they are further away and they are not as important as the person you are painting.

The person is always the most important element in a portrait and this is where you should place your lightest lights and your darkest darks. The human eye is naturally drawn to areas of high contrast, so if you want the viewer to look at the person in your painting, that is where you need to place them. You, as the artist, control where you place your highlights and how light you make them. You can paint a good portrait with no background but you can ruin a good portrait with a bad background, so if you’re in doubt about what to do with a background, leave it a neutral color.

Use what you know or learned about lost edges to enhance the illusion that your figure inhabits the space in the background. We’ve all seen portraits where the head appears cut out and placed against another painting. This happens often when the artist doesn’t consider his or her background in the same context of the subject. One of the most important rules I have learned in my studies is to incorporate a color of the background into the shadows of my subject.

It’s best to paint the background colors FIRST and OVERLAP the colors into the area where you will be painting the head or figure. This will help create the illusion of depth you need and eliminate the need to carefully paint your background color around your subject. Which can give you a strange cut-out effect, needless to say.

According to Helen Van Wyk, in her book, Portraits in Oil the Van Wyk Way, p. 23-24, you have four choices to make when you paint a background into your portrait.
1) You can use a dark background, which Helen says will make you flesh colors look light and lively.
2) You can paint a very light background, which is more difficult but works nicely for a child’s portrait.
3) You can decide on a medium tone, which is the easiest route to go, or you can
4) paint a gradation from light to dark, which is perhaps the most interesting choice.

Helen suggests that a successful background is always one of grayed colors, or paint that has been made less intense by mixing it with black and white or it’s complement.

I prefer to mix my own grays rather than to rely on black and white and if you paint with watercolors you don’t have the option of opaque paint anyway. Beautiful neutrals can be mixed with complements: try ultramarine blue and burnt sienna, and alizarin crimson and viridian or phthalo green. Fascinating things can be done with backgrounds if you take the time to learn how to do them right. Just remember that a background is just that: a background. Save the sharp edges and deeper hues for your center of interest, which will always be the person you are painting.

Perhaps the best way to decide on what value you want for your background is to complete a series of thumbnail sketches like the ones I have here before you start the painting. Many times we just want to get some paint on the canvas and don’t start kicking ourselves until we are at a point where we realize something is wrong and we can’t quite put our finger on it. Creating thumbnails can go a long way towards preventing this.

ACTIVITY NO. 2
Begin your next portrait by doing a series of thumbnail value sketches before you start the painting. Feel free to post them here. Or you might choose a photo from a newspaper or magazine and do several black and white value studies with different backgrounds. The sketches should be small (3” x 4”) and drawn quickly.

I hope the information I’ve provided here will help you paint or draw better portraits.

Nora

PS: “In the fields of observation chance favors the prepared mind.”
(Louis Pasteur)

Hi Nora! Well done guide on both edges and backgrounds. I have printed it out and put in in my book of tips and techniques. I appreciate all the time and effort you have put into it.

It’s interesting that you placed backgrounds and edges in the same guide. They are so completely related and yet, for me, so challenging in much different ways. I love edges. The play of hard edges against soft, of lost against found makes a mediochre painting better and a good painting great. To me, there is no more obvious measure of a painter’s progress than the use of edges. Now backgrounds…..What a struggle! I have ruined more than one painting with a poorly executed backgound. Painting the background along with the portrait is definately one way to help integrate them, but for me, it’s the temperature and color relationship to the portrait that makes or breaks a background. I’ve never come across any consistant rules for this relationship. It’s funny, but even good painters seem to have a hard time explaining this. Whenever I get a new book on painting, I look with anticipation to the section on backgrounds. I am almost always disappointed with the advice. Many teachers acknowledge the importance of backgounds, but have a hard time defining the solutions. I struggle with it on every portrait. I’ve yet to come up with a confident approach. I guess I’ll just keep studying the masters – classic and modern – and try my best to follow along.

Thank you once more for all the work you put in on the guide.

Bruce

Hiya Bruce! (Bernie-too )

Bruce, I think the main reason I chose to do these two subjects was that they are the most difficult part of a painting for me too. And I thought maybe if I looked more deeply into the “background” of them, I might discover something. What is so hard about them both is that there is no set formula. You can go the easy route of just graying down the colors for a background but you might want to make a statement about the person in the portrait and use a hot red one. Neither choice is wrong. It is a personal choice and it’s entirely up to the artist. Sound procedure doesn’t always make for exciting paintings. I’ve seen beautiful portraits with solid black and brown backgrounds.

Here is a wonderful example by Steve Childs of a background full of wild color that doesn’t detract from the child’s face at all.

http://www.stevechilds.com/websites/SteveChilds/works/1768_24588m.jpg

Nora