Stanka!

This weekend was pretty amazing - I got to take a 2 day workshop with the incredible multi-award winning portrait artist Stanka Kordic. It was such an honor to learn from her! Her paintings are sort of life-changing, I don't know how else to describe them. Please be sure to check out her website to see for yourself.

Image Copyright Stanka Kordic 2012

Each morning, Stanka did an alla prima demo. She approached the painting a lot looser than I'm used to, making seemingly random underpainting marks and then "finding" the contours and features of the portrait within the loose marks. In almost everything, she used a large brush - sometimes simple house painting brushes! She then layed in large flat planes of color - something that I would like to do more in my own work - and refined everything later. And suddenly *POP!* there he was.

 Amazing!

Here is my go at it:

This photo is a little dark, but you get the idea

 Thanks Eileen at BAYarts, Arthur the awesome model and especially Stanka for a wonderful weekend! Can't wait to try out these new techniques.