jfk painting december 2020

 I decided to paint my favorite president because i need practice painting faces, so i decided on john f kennedy. First, i had to sketch it out on the canvas and then outline it with pen. I started with just a basic outline of the face, then i started to fill it in with different shading lines so i know where to paint the shading.  I thought the portrait by itself was a bit bare so i added one of my favorite quotes by jfk and did some cool calligraphy art with it. Now, i had to start thinking about the colors and i had a couple different ideas. My first idea was to do black and white for the face with a solid background color. I filled in the face with different shades of grey, i used the lines i made to help guide me with the shading. I filled in the background with an orange color and the words with red. I decided that the red wording looked a little too odd for my liking so i decided to color over it with white. I had to do at least 8 layers of white because the paint i used was so thin and the red was so bright. I went over the head and shoulders with a thicker black pen to make it stand out more. I thought the orange/yellow background looked pretty bad and i wanted to fix it so i decided on half blue, half white. I had to repaint the whole canvas white and pretty much start from scratch. After many layers of white, i made the bottom half blue and painted a couple more white layers over the words. The top half is white and the letters are blue, i thought the opposites looked really good. I went over the lettering with sharpie and made it stand out more.