Painting Shapes and Creating Form with Casein Paint

I want to experiment with the idea of painting shapes to create form rather than blending. I am attracted to painters who don't over blend and tend to leave a lot of there brushwork as singular marks all over the canvas. To me, it's more of a painterly way of going about things and in the end I think it's more interesting to look at.

Lately I've been watching the work of Jess Watts, you can see his YouTube channel here. He has this way of starting a portrait by outlining all the value shifts across the form. When it's in pencil yet it looks quite odd but as you study the shapes that are created you'll see he's breaking down the figure by value. Jeff usually uses Gauche for his sketch painting but here I'll be using Casein paint.

So I'm going to give the method a shot. My reference for this sketch is a slice of a Ben Lustenhouwer painting. I'll try to match his value shifts by tiling or shaping the figure with blocks of value. You can see the full painting at his website here.

Close up of Ben Lustenhouwer painting that I'll be using for reference.

As you see after I initially sketched in the form with charcoal. Then I went back in and started to outline the value shifts that I see in Ben's Painting with pencil.

Here I start laying the darkest values first with Ivory Black Casein paint. The areas with Ivory Black straight out of the tube are mostly the eye brows and directly around the eyes. All other value shifts are with a slight mixture of white. Casein can be painting very opaque and I think it's very similar to Gauche as it can be re wetted and worked back into after it dries to the touch.

Here most of the values have been laid down in there biggest shapes. It's still looking pretty rough at this point due to the fact that the more slight value shifts have not been painted yet. It's worth pointing out that most painting go through this "ugly" phase. That stage where beginners tend to give up because it's not going the way they want. One thing I've learned is you just need to stick with it and keep fixing the problem areas. The ugly stage will always be there, you just have to push through it.

Here is the finished shape sketch and in the end I probably blended the shapes a little more than I wanted to. There are a few problem areas but nothing that couldn't be fixed in the final rendering. Since I used Casein paint I could very easily use this as an under painting and finish it will oils. I like this way of starting out because you can game plan your values in a stage where it's easily fixed.