Double portrait
Finished work on a large portrait. The format of the picture is 150x220cm. Oil/canvas. The work took about six months and more than a thousand hours of pure time.
The painting depicts Tita and Gustav Serlachius. Representatives of famous Finnish families. In the background is a copy of Raphael’s «Madonna in the Chair»
The video shows a fragment of work on a copy of Raphael’s painting. A pencil sketch is outlined in ink for subsequent application of imprimatura.
The final work looks like this:
Work on the portrait progressed incredibly difficult. A poor quality photograph was used as a reference. The exact outlines of the eyes and the lines of the mouth were practically invisible, and they had to be restored from barely noticeable shadows and hints of light.
The characters I draw always look like the original, because I don’t redraw the photo, but draw the people that are in the photo. I do not have the task of making a copy from a photo, I depict the characteristic personality traits and convey the mood of the characters, taking into account their physical parameters and lighting features.
You can easily notice that the image in the photo is flat, while in the oil painting the faces have volume and stand out in space.
