A Painting for My Teacher

When my chemistry teacher saw my self-portrait piece, he asked me if I could paint something for him and naturally I agreed. He offered to pay me a lot in return, but as its something I enjoy and as a thank you gift, I told him to just buy me the materials. He emailed me the picture he wanted and the colour scheme, and we discussed canvas size and paint mediums. In the end we decided to use oil paints as they were easier for me to paint with and get a realistic effect and they gave a softer finish. The composition is of a Sikh man with characteristic, symbolic objects. This particular composition I found hard to map out, not only was it side-view (which I haven't painted before and try to avoid when drawing), but the man is kneeling and his head is tilted which I found very difficult to achieve. Once I completed the drawing, I started painting  the base coat. This is just a wash with the basic mid tones of the colours I will use. This does three things; 1) Allows you to see if your composition works, because the wash is light, it is easy to work on top of to alter things 2) Allows you to see if the colours work, now that the colours are on the canvas, next to each other, do they work or do some areas need to be made lighter/darker. 3) it provides a base layer which you can carefully work on, preventing bits of white canvas showing up from underneath The drawing and base coat took me around three hours to complete, unfortunately due to technology, I lost the pictures showing the bas coat. Yesterday, I spent two hours painting the face, turbin and the hands and feet, trying to get the shading right and the angles correct. Here is an image, despite it being "complete", it still needs a lot of work which I will put in later.  This morning, I spent an hour and a half painting the top half of the outfit, I found it very enjoyable to paint in all the creases, I just wish I had a clearer, larger image to work from which would have made it easier.  Anyways, That's it so far, I'm just going to go and work on the bottom half of the outfit in a bit, once I blog a bit more ;) Marwa