Portrait of Aleksandr

This is the finished portrait of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and I have to say, the photo does not do it justice. This thing is really big, like four feet tall big! If you have a chance, go check it out, as this is the last weekend it will be hanging in the gallery, or if your around during the week you can call and make an appointment (Rothick.com).

I created a page for all the steps in making this portrait of Aleksandr. The steps are in descending order so you can easily scroll through the entire process. Click the link below to see this process and read more about the meaning behind this portrait of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Creating the Portrait of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Portrait of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is ink, oil, and paper (pages from Cancer Ward) on wood panel. 32" x 48". Sold

Portraits

Vadim (lives!)

Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov

Friedrich Federau

Aleksei Filippovich Shulubin

Oleg Filimonovich Kostoglotov

These are all small 8" x 10" portraits of some of the characters in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book Cancer Ward (the same book I used for the background of Aleksandr's portrait). I was originally going to make eleven portraits to coincide with the eleven patients in Cancer Ward, (which also happens to be the number of years Aleksandr spent in labor camps and the number of flowers I made for exactly that reason) but I ran short on time after having quite a few complications... so there may be more of these to come.

Each portrait is ink, oil, and newspaper on wood panel. 8" x 10"

Almost Finished...

After finishing up all the outlining, it was time to start filling in the body with black ink. I actually went back through and filled in all the smallest areas using that same fine point brush. I also used it to round out any detailed areas in preparation for a bigger brush. With artwork, I was always taught to use the biggest brush you can, and thats exactly what I did here. I used three different brush sizes to ink in all the areas. Below is as far as I got yesterday, that shoulder is responsible for most of my time...

My close friend and fellow world traveller has posted up Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's biography for this weeks Wikipedia Wednesday! Check it out here, and look at his site often. There is fresh and very entertaining posts daily and his music reviews are always right on. Thanks Brad!

And make sure you mark your calendars, call your friends, cancel your appointments, because Beneath the Broken Bottles and Cigarette Butts begins in 10 days!

Up close with the fine point brush.



Got the details in and even finished the flower. You can also see the pages I had to paste over for my late night shading mistakes. It all works out in the end... Now the body is ready for the big brush!

Inking in the Outline

My next step, once I got everything in its proper place, is to ink in the outline. I am doing the whole portrait in ink because 1. its not thick like black paint 2. it blends really smoothly 3. it dries flat and doesnt show brush strokes. So basically Im going over all the lines I already drew, but with a bottle of ink and a very fine tipped brush. This actually took me most of the day to finish because this picture is huge and there is a lot of detail to it. Eleven days until opening night at the Rothick Arthaus!

On this day in 2008, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn passed away. I hope this portrait will both honor his accomplishments and inform more people about who he was and the relentless stand he took against the Soviet Union.

Tools of the trade.



You can see there is an area I still have to do on his chest. Im adding a flower in there and I just haven't figured out how I want to do it...



Detail shot of the sleeve after inking in the outlines. Can you find a penguin, a polar bear, a whale, and a map?

A Complex Drawing

Now that I got all the pages pasted on a board, my next step is to start drawing Aleksandr. It was a full day just to get the outline and placement correct, and another half day for his shoulder. By the evening of the first day I was getting pretty tired and should've called it quits. Instead I got the idea to shade in the dark areas with a light ink wash so I could get a feel of how it will look. Afterward, I had to paste a few pages over the areas that should have stayed the page color...oops.

Penciled in the outline, and started to wash it with ink. Even there I had already painted over vital highlights. A few pages pasted over fixed it pretty easy though. You can also see the shoulder here is still pretty basic.



Finished shading the big areas. These will be black. Although it was a bad idea, at least you can see what it will kind of look like... its hard being patient.



His shoulder has so many little parts to it. It took me a long time and a lot of erasing to get it to look accurate and correctly shaped.

Classes

Well this week I finished up teaching my Intro to Sketching and Drawing class and my Photoshop class at the IncredibleArtist gallery. Both classes were three sessions and each session lasted three hours.

Intro to Sketching and Drawing was every Wednesday night. I ended up having four students (yes, I know there are only three in the picture... I can count, promise). It was a lot of fun, and I think we all learned a lot. We went over three different subject matters: still life, landscape, and portrait drawing. I pushed the students as much as I could without making them angry at me. I will be teaching more drawing classes later on this summer too. Ill let you know when I do...

The Photoshop class, I decided, would be better as a one on one class. It works out better this way because I can really focus on just one person at a time and make sure they understand stuff better. The lady I taught this week knew absolutely nothing about the program before we began. Now she can edit photos and knows the basics for almost any type of work in Photoshop. She will also be showing her work at the gallery starting tomorrow night at our summer Artapalooza party!

I only have a few photos from my classes, I will put up more once I get them from the gallery... Thanks Joanna, Liz, Stephen, Donny, and Diane!