Timelapse: female portrait with hands in a cool palette

Here I show the process of working on a female portrait with hands, which I did together with the students of the online course and the students at the St. Petersburg studio.

The piece took about 20 hours; session after session the portrait was refined and worked up. First I chose a noir-ish cool palette of violet and pinkish large masses, which were gradually refined and filled with volume. In painting from life there’s a notion of "choosing the gaze." That’s when the model slightly changes their expression and the direction of their look while posing, and the artist has to notice it, choose the right one and catch it. In this piece I repainted the eyes about five times before I found the note I wanted. In the end it turned into an interesting, fairly worked-up noir portrait.

I worked with two brushes: a textured one and Nikko Rull (both attached)