Working up a portrait 4th application

Partly complete

Partly complete

Suddenly I found myself free to paint today. Two oil paintings that I had already spent several afternoons doing were just begging to be taken to the next phase.
One was a market scene that I started in Lucy Manley’s oil painting class two or three weeks ago. For the first time I was using a 12 x 24 gallery canvas and I struggled to adapt the scene of Bloor Street that Lucy gave us to this odd (for me) shaped canvas.

The other painting is a larger canvas: 22 x 32 inches. This busker was playing the harp on the street in Quebec City in 2008 when I took several photos of his rather paintive face. His feeling for the music he was making was obvious.

Since then I have painted him with watercolour, and with acrylic.
I have posted the four previous versions of this work in order to show the stages of the painting: the charcoal drawing, the first blocking, the first colour and the second blocking. Unfortunately I haven’t yet learned how to do multiple pix on a post so they appeared out of order.

Today I tackled the whole again, striving to make the paint go on more loosely and to capture the various colours both in the background and on his face. I only managed to do about half of what I wanted to,but I think what I did do looks more loose than the last attempt.

Base coat applied

First colours