"PORTRAIT OF JENNIFER CONNELLY"
36X24 Oil on canvas
I started this project after I watched the movie "A Beautiful Mind", where Jennifer Connelly plays as John Nash's wife (played by Russell Crowe), Alicia Nash. I thought she was gorgeous and it was also about time I made a portrait of someone using oil paint. I wanted to prove to myself that i could make a good realistic portrait. I did eventually, but i had to go through months of frustrations to get it right. I've painted quite a lot before but i've never painted a portrait on this scale and detail before so I knew from the beginning that this was going to be a long tedious process of trial and errors. I decided to document the whole preocess.
I started out quite chaoticly. A 36 x 24 canvas was pretty big, so eyeballing jennifer connelly's face measurements were pretty hard. I thought about doing the grid technique but i wanted this to be a challenge for me to train my eyeballing skills. Because of this i had to make a lot of adjustments to the eyes and lips, constantly changing position and size.
at this point i was already satisfied with the rendering of the face, so I left it unfinished, kind of like a broken sculpture. I added designs around it (which also went through several trials and errors) to make it whole. I kept fiddling with the design until i decided it was done. Thank you!
