5 Game-Changing Lessons from My Workshop with Tatiana Popova
The Angmoh, oil painting done during the workshop
The art studio is super cramp, you can fit maybe 5 people max, with easels and painting trolley, there’s barely much room to move. Tatiana Popova is a Russian artist based in Florence, teaching a classical atelier style oil painting. I was introduce to her by a friend who took her course in Florence earlier this year, and since she’ll spend a month teaching in Singapore, I thought why not go.
There’s very little difference in learning and. teaching in my opinion, in that my mindset is the same, when I teach, I learn from myself, when I am a student, I also learn by doing from myself, but in a classroom there’s an external ‘experience hands and eyes’ in the room that helps give other opinions besides the internal dialogue already happening. When I am a student, I try not to be a smart alec, and I try to leave my ego at home, and arrive with the assumption that I am here to be open to suggestions, advice and feedback. Often I find when we unconsciously believe we know things coming into a learning environment, we close ourselves from the prospect of widening our perspective, even worse if our pride gets the front seat. But I digress.
I choose the reference of this Angmoh, I call the bearded face because I wanted to experience what it’s like to paint facial hair in oil. I’ve not painted using oil much at all, let alone a face, so I am very much looking forward to the feeling of oil on my brushes.
The first week, using sepia conte pencil to sketch monochrome, and to quietly digest the image that was printed 1 to 1 in size. The large print removes any need to scale. It takes up a lot of room in an already cramped studio, but it’s effective for the purpose.
Once the monochrome sketch is pretty much done, using old school transfer method, that is tracing paper with a charcoal on your sketch, in reverse, then tracing it off into your canvas with a pen, like this! ready for painting the week after.
Week two, oil paints are mixed to match the skin tone, shadows and hair, as well as the background colours using a palette knife. one must learn to see what these colours actually are if not following the original photograph. I choose to stay with grey for the background, but change the t-shirt to an olive green to give a bigger contrast to the painting.
I love the scratchiness of the rough hog hair brushes, it creates a nice texture of his beard and hair, but for the skin, I tried to use a softer brush so the skin is blending more smoothly. Week two I painted up to this point, where there’s a rough idea of what the finished face would look like yet the details are all still missing
Week 3, I return to the palette, and the first layer has dried somewhat to a tacky finish, and every other colours I decide to use will now be added on top. I initially have a lot more white hair trying to follow the original reference. Tatiana suggested maybe I could rethink this because the value contrast is much better shown when there’s less white hair.
The eyes are hard to get right. There’s an intensity of the eyes staring back at me from the photograph that my painting seem to lack.
Here’s the close up of the final painting. Did I manage to get the intense stare? no, but I got a kinder, more tired look instead. Perhaps it’s a remarkable copy of how I was feeling because I was beginning to fall sick on week 3.
What I learned about myself from this 3 weekend workshop from Tatiana Popova was :
I move too fast, as an urban sketchers, I’ve trained myself to get a move on, and capture the initial response to subjects and objects. In oil painting, we go very slow and I had to adjust my habits. I enjoyed the slow only at week 2 when I started painting, the sketching at week one was a challenge to slow down.
On shapes, I learned that paying more careful attention to the outer shape before chiselling inside the shape, gives the painting a better outcome, there’s more opportunity to get the shape right when we don’t rush into the inner shapes too soon.
There’s a lot to ignore and change even when there’s a very static image to follow. I can shift from cool to warm where the image is more the opposite. I can move shadows and shapes around the eyebrows to be sympathetic to the sketch, and therefor ignoring what’s on the photograph. I really appreciate this. If you noticed, my portrait is way more warm, more green and red while the picture is more cool, more blue and orange
Big shapes are even more important in portraits than in landscapes or urban scapes, especially where cast shadows, highlights and planes are subtle. AND Tatiana has a deep understanding of the structure of a skull and head, which is rightly so, therefor it was easier for her to tell her students why some shapes are the way they are. A mark of a good teacher is the ability to explain what’s good about her approach.
Artist studio must be inspiring to be in, without that, it’s a dead spiritless place to work. I won’t mention where, but I don’t know if I’ll be back to this school. I do like and appreciate Tatiana’s skills. Thankfully that saved the day.
What do you think of this “ Angmoh’ portrait?
I enjoyed the process of refreshing my oil painting skills, I find that I am able to reset my fast moving urban sketching habits to slow it all down and I enjoy the feeling of oil on canvas, the smell does not bother me at all. I think The Angmoh looks pretty good for a first time in decades back to oil painting.