Portrait Painting in Acrylics - Painting the Jacket

Portrait Painting in Acrylics

Painting the Jacket

Artists often use a more spontaneous painting technique with looser brushwork and heavier pigment when they paint the outer clothing in a portrait. This is done to contrast with and consequently emphasise the more detailed head.

For a similar reason, the tone and detail of our jacket darkens and diminishes towards the edge of the portrait to avoid any possible distraction from the focal point of the face.

The underpainting of the jacket was built up with several glazes of sap green to achieve a dark translucent surface. The lapels of the jacket received fewer coats of the glaze to leave lighter outlines around their edges and collars.

The rendering of the folds of the jacket cloth was achieved by following the usual process:

applying the dark tones

applying the light tones

refining the tone, colour and texture

1) The Dark Tones: These were painted with thicker than usual glazes of prussian blue mixed with sap green and applied with a half inch hogs hair filbert brush. The dark tones establish the basic shape of the folds on the jacket. As you begin to paint more freely with a lager brush, it is important that you know exactly what you are trying to do. Therefore, the drawing of the shapes of the folds was worked out in advance in another preparatory study so that little was left to guesswork.

2) The Light Tones: These were painted with a mixture of permanent light green mixed with titanium white and applied with a quarter inch hogs hair filbert brush. It was important to use titanium white in the mixture as its opacity was necessary to cover the dark underpainting. The light tones begin to establish the highlights of the folds and the texture of the jacket's cloth. They are applied far brighter than necessary because they will lose some of their intensity when they are blended into the underpainting.

Final Painting of the Jacket

3) Refining Tone, Colour and Texture: The final stage in painting the jacket is to carefully blend and balance the dark and light tones with the underpainting, smoothing out any awkward looking bumps and filling in any irregularities in the paint surface in order to create a smooth fabric with natural folds. This process has the effect of reducing the contrasts between the darkest and lightest tones of the jacket and unifying the overall effect.

Painting Technique for the Jacket

Painting Technique

The actual size detail above gives a close-up view of the painting technique used for the jacket.

The basic dark and light tones were rendered with larger and stiffer hogs-hair brushes to match the scale of the area being painted and for greater control over the thicker paint. Brushing and smudging was the technique that was most usefully employed at this stage.

The refinement of the tone, colour and texture was executed with thinner glazes of colour and mostly stippled with softer brushes to smooth out any irregularities. Some very fine glazes of white and yellow were carefully built up with small brushes to highlight the form, while glazes of prussian blue and ivory black were applied to increase the depth of the darkest areas.

Follow the progress of our Portrait
1. Drawing the Portrait	2. Painting the Background
3. Painting the Eyes	4. Painting the Skin
5. Painting the Hair	6. Painting the Shirt and Waistcoat
7. Painting the Jacket	8. Framing the Portrait
9. Materials for Acrylic Painting	10. Basic Illustrated Version


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