Painted Portrait Project inspired by Inès Longevial
clockwise from top left: portrait age 12 - portrait age 9 - portrait age 15 - portrait age 15
What I live, what I see – my paintings are like a diary that talk about my life at some point, and grow up with me.
- inés longevial
When I first discovered the work of Inès Longevial I felt like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. Longevial’s paintings and behind the scenes musings flow like an acoustic love song drenched in french girl cool. Warm earth tones punctuated by a pop of robin egg blue. The piercing gaze of giant almond shaped eyes… hands, flowers, the silhouette of the female form. You can detect a nod to the classics; Rodin, Claudel, Picasso but the work is truly her own.
Inès grew up in the countryside of South-West France. She first picked up a paint brush at the age of 8. After studying and earning a degree from Toulouse in Applied Arts, she moved to Paris at the age of 23. She was discovered shortly after landing in Paris and has had solo exhibits in many major cities; Los Angeles, Berlin, San Francisco, Paris, and New York.
Inès approaches her massive paintings from close up. Using long smooth brush strokes. She works primarily in oil but her feed also provides a look inside her daily practice that includes fast artist sketches in oil pastel and line drawings in pen and graphite.
At the beginning of the pandemic Inès released a series of free coloring pages and often shares the finished pages of her fans (age 3-95).
Inès released a book of her work in November 2020 and it has sold out twice!
“This book is like opening my secret box. It contains a big part of my life and memories chronologically selected from the past two years. You will navigate between dreams, travels, work, souvenirs, songs and surprises. I wish to bring you hope and comfort by reading it.”
I DO NOT WANT TO LIMIT MYSELF. I DON’T LIKE TO REPRODUCE WHAT I’VE DONE FOR TOO LONG. TOOL CHANGE IS ALWAYS A RENEWAL FOR ME, A WAY OF TURNING THE PAGE AND FINDING NEW THINGS TO SAY AS A TECHNIQUE EVOLVES AND CHANGES.
-INÈS LONGeVIAL
It’s me, but I’m made up of all the people I know
-inès Longevial
Painted Portrait Project inspired by artist Inès Longevial
ART CAMP
acrylic paints, oil pastels, canvas, brushes, and pencil
materials:
water cup + rag
Suggest brushes: round flat and line
image reference suggestion: photo copy of a self portrait (capture shadows and highlights) + a few examples of longevial paintings
free coloring pages from inès longevial
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There are so many ways to approach this project. You could work directly on a photocopy image, you could sketch on paper, I pulled out the 8”x 10” canvas for this group of 9-15 year olds and they really loved this project. They mainly stuck to painting but I did have oil pastels out in case they wanted to work with those as well. Oil pastels are much richer and more pigmented than acrylic paint so to achieve the richness of oil you will have to apply layers. These artist’s stopped after layer 3 but the paintings could probably a layer 4 and 5.
Select a reference image This could be a black and white photocopy of yourself, a picture from a magazine, one of Inès coloring pages or paintings
Sketch your portrait lightly with pencil onto your canvas
Add an underpainting (Inès often creates a dark underpainting for her first coat. You can see these darker shades peeking through her work). This group of artists explored earth tones, pastels and brights and decided not to go darker with their under painting instead they just build up the color layer by layer.
Acrylic paint dries fairly quickly so they were able to do 3 layers of paint in one 2 hour session.
Inès often incorporates flowers into her portraits, so think about adding a flower to your painting!
For the final step they refined the shadows and contour lines and added more white to the eyes.
first layer | second layer + background | 3rd layer
L to R: artist age 15 , artist age 12, artist age 9, artist age 15
