Painting faces exercise 01 Zorn palette

This post shows a number of faces plucked off the internet and painted for this exercise. Some are famous and some not. The task is just to practice painting faces. They are done on pieces of paper and board sized at 10" x 8", primed, and then done in a period 3 hrs of so, working wet in to wet. The images are not drawn with pencils in a careful way, but drawn with diluted oil paint in a rough manner, and then painted over. Often the proportions are refined as it is painted until it looks reasonably right, in the one sitting. One other important element of these exercises is that they have been done using a limited range of colours, called the Zorn palette. It is named after the Swedish artist, Anders Zorn (18 February 1860 – 22 August 1920). It consists of just 4 colors being yellow ochre, ivory black, Cadmium red and titanium white. These colours suit faces very well, though landscape subjects would not work so well as blues and greens cannot be mixed.