Head Studies

A few months ago there was a discussion of the working methods of William Bouguereau at one of the forums I visit regularly. That struck me as pretty interesting. I'm personally not a huge fan of Bouguereau, but I have to admit that the man knew how to handle paint. As a result I thought it would be a good idea to try a study or two and see if I could come away with some added knowledge. There was one problem though, there didn't seem to be any agreement of how exactly he did it. I've never seen one in person so that made it even harder to decide for myself who was right or at least closest to right. After a few weeks of discussion and one side arguing for one way and another side offering arguments for a different approach I finally decided it didn't matter that much to me. But by then I'd already dug through my saved files and found a couple Bouguereauish poses courtesy of the lovely faestock from Deviant Art link . I had them drawn on the panels and was already to go. So I just decided to do them the way I normally would. Here are the results. Both are not much more than sketches and are unfinished. They could be polished quite a bit more, and brought to a higher degree of finish, but I don't know that that would really add much. Besides I'd done all I'd set out to do.


Oil on Panel
12 x 10
SOLD


Oil on Panel
10 x 8
SOLD

I think this is the better of the two. For all you paint freaks out there that like to get up close here's a couple details.





All in all I think I may go back to the original idea and see if I can do a convincing Bouguereau study. The man could push paint around.