I decided it was time to finally give oil painting a go, and as I only have at my disposal the very limited ‘Zorn Palette’ (red, ochre, black & white), I thought it fitting for my first attempt to paint Anders Zorn’sSelf Portrait with Model – originally painted in 1896 – in which Zorn can be seen proudly showing off the four colour palette in question.
The original work is a reasonable size (117 x 94 cm) but I went for a something much smaller (25 x 20 cm) and only planned to spend 2-3 hours at most, using the study to get a feel for how the paint applied to the canvas and how easy (or hard) it was to control.
First impressions:
- I could keep going back to the same patches of mixed colour on the palette and not find a skin had formed or it had dried hard – this I liked.
- I realised that when painting in acrylics, I tend to apply paint to the canvas and then determine if it needs adjustment, either in hue, temperature or value, correcting where necessary. This has never really been a problem because due to the fast drying time of acrylics, I could apply thin glazes to adjust or modify the opaque mix on the palette and correct. Because oils stay wet, this sort of on the fly adjustments were more difficult to achieve, and more often than not resulted in a muddy mess – this I wasn’t too keen on and highlighted that a straight swap of acrylics with oils would also require a change in how I plan and execute a painting.
For a first crack though, I wasn’t too disappointed in the result. It certainly isn’t a like for like reproduction, but I feel it gives me a reasonable starting point to build from.
