Troy Polamalu

This is version one of my "work-in-progress" of Troy's oil painting. This piece is being done on a specially prepared 1/8" Masonite board. It is called "Claybord" manufactured by the Ampersand company. The board has a base layer of white clay, over-layed with a coating of Gesso. The surface is rather smooth. It has just enough tooth to help pull the paint from the brush. It is considerably more of a smoother surface than most canvas surfaces. The two biggest advantages are that the Masonite is a lot more stable and durable than a canvas and the smooth surface lets me get a more desirable "realistic" finished piece. The oil painting is quite a bit bigger than the pencil study. Troy's image is just shy of being life-size. The Claybord is 18" x 24" overall and I paint edge-to-edge. After drawing all my lines on the board, I started painting Troy's helmet and face. As you can see, having the face guard over his face gives an added challenge to make sure all the spaces between the bars look like they all look like they go with his face. It sounds simple but you are dealing with many different colors…

This is the first installment of the "work-in-progress" for Troy Polamalu's pencil study. This will aid in the process of working into the oil painting that is coming next. The pencil study helps to work out any hard to see details and techniques to get the right textures, shading, shadows and so on. The overall image size is 10" x 16" where as the oil will be 18" x 24" overall. I started by hand-rubbing in the cloudy background. It is achieved by applying powdered charcoal using a Kleenex tissue on my index finger. You can see the charcoal I am using on the piece of paper in the photograph below. Most of the actual drawing is done with German-made "Faber-Castell" drawing pencils. I use a very soft lead. The pencils are 6B and 8B grade. A normal "school pencil" is usually a 2B. This is how I am able to achieve the darkest of darks. It is very hard to keep a good point on the pencils and they do require frequent sharpening. Thank God for electric sharpeners! The first "work-in-progress" picture of Troy was done in 5-6 hours. In the second picture, I am 9-10 hours into the…