Random Faces Oil Painting Part 1: sketching it in

I’ve decided that I’m going to take you step by step-ish on the current painting I’m working on.

My roommates and I decided that I should paint something to hang in our living room, and I thought that doing a whole bunch of faces would be fun. We brainstormed a bunch of movie or TV characters, celebrities, random stuff, inside jokes, and logos that would work for it and planned on using all of my roommates and I. I got two canvases to make it a diptych (two separate paintings that are one piece).

First, I used a ruler to block off a whole bunch of randomly shaped squares. After making a small note in each box of what or who would go there, I started looking for references to use for each square.

Then I started sketching the faces in!

Here’s the thing about sketching in the faces on a canvas intended to become an oil paint, or acrylic for that matter. Be warned that the pencil lead will smear into the paint and give you lots of pain. Therefore, most of the time, you only want to put the barest lines for proportion sake and then hope you get it right with the paint. I did that with this one somewhat, although you’d want to make it even lighter around the eyes and mouth than I have it now if you wanted to use this method:

This is going to be Heath Ledger’s Joker.

However, try as I might, my sketches usually don’t start out right, and so I end up fixing and shading them until I’m satisfied and they end up looking like this:

My pre-sketch of Wentworth Miller as smoldering away as Michael Scofield. My roommates and I–okay, mainly it’s me–have a small Prison Break obsession right now.

Which would be fine if I was leaving it pencil, but that much graphite would be absolute misery to try to paint over.

However, I know a secret.

In cases like this, I simply apply a very thin coat of gesso, slightly watered down, over the lead. If you don’t have gesso, some thinned out white acrylic would probably work as well. After it dries, assuming you do it thin enough, you can still clearly see the pencil marks underneath, but it won’t smear at all when you try to paint it!

Don’t worry if the pre-sketchess a little rough–you can see that mine are–because you are going to painting over them.

As of a couple of weeks ago, here was the progress on my piece…