Decided to have fun and did this little gouache study. At this point at did no blending at all. Let's now have double fun and start using some "water glazing" to soften some of those sharp edges. I might have gone a bit all over the place with the colors here...

Yesterday I went ahead and moved to the next phase but only to realize 2 issues: 1. My middle light was too light and 2. Some of the drawing was annoyingly off (eyes, nose, lips and side contour of the face). I could have moved on and tried to fix that on the go but this is not a race and I want this learning experience to result in the best possible painting I can produce with my current abilities. So I decided to take a step back, fix the drawing issues as much as I could and cover the whole light area with what I started to use for my half tones. I think this already looks better :-)

Not an easy task to handle the wet paint. I’m a bit worried about the next phases as things could go very messy quite fast. It’s amazing how Morgan manages to layer the paint stroke after stroke with such confidence and an awesome result.

Given my little experience with oil pain I’m pretty happy with how it looks so far. Let’s keep pushing play!

Dear Morgan, people usually use a warm red like cad red light for the Zorn palette. Can you explain why you chose Alizarin Crimson which is a cooler red? Of course it's closer to ketchup ;-)

Hey Morgan, can’t say how much I’m already learning with your course. It’s just awesome! During the Dark values lesson, you explain you use a little bit of your medium (gamsol+walnut oil) to help the paint to flow in order to draw with the soft brush. Do you have any advice for a good replacement if I want to stay completely away from any solvent? Would the walnut alkyd medium from M. Graham do the job or are it’s properties too different from what we are looking for here? Thanks a lot, Florian