I'm actually in the midst of P-shopping some other things for a Digital Illustration class I'm currently teaching. I'm so not qualified for it, but they talked me into it. Weird, huh, considering what I'd said about the MFA requirement, as posted in the Cafe. They'l let me teach something I'm not qualified for, but they won't let me teach something I am qualified for in BFA. Okay, that's off-topic :P

I designated 4 areas A, B, C and D, plus a wee arrow to show a drawing change. I did re-draw and re-position the eyes. The mouth I moved just a tad, and put it on its proper plane.

Area "A" was too warm, saturated with an orange hue. It is true there are areas of great warmth in the transitions across the "terminator" (the line that separates the dark and light planes), but this warmth was dominating the entire core shadow. I poly-lassoed it and hue shifted towards red, desaturated it quite a bit and knocked back the contrasts.

Area "B" sort of has the opposite problem. This is interesting, because in indoor light situations, the reflected lights in the head have a tendency to be cooler (or at least, more neutral, thus percieved cooler), as the main light is generally warm (especially in incandescent light). However, your main light is coming from outside! It is not cool, but what happens is that it bounces of interor objects back into the head on the shadow side and becomes quite warm in areas of saturated skin tone (ball of nose, cheek and chin, for instance). "B" was too neutral/ochre so I increased the saturation a little bit, and shifted it towards red.

There are some places in these broad areas where I had to add back or subtract away warmth because of small specific instances of these temperature changes. The cheek on the lower right side of "A" is an example of where I had de-saturated it along with the rest of "A", but there still needed to be warmth there, as the middle third of the face always has the most pigmentation (warm colors).

"C" is important to getting the jaw to separate a bit better from the sweater. His head casts a shadow here, so I darkened it (and de-saturated the blue a bit, as this is what happens in shadow).

I did the opposite to "D", as it seperates his little chubby cheek from the collar. I lightened it, thus bringing out the edge plane of the cheek rounding underneath the jaw line.

And the turquoise-colored arrow indicates a small drawing change. His head shape is more squared-off here than in your original. This helps with likeness a lot, getting more specific with the baby's particular profile (these little guys don't have the hair to hide their profiles!).

Hope this helps, Julie!

Julie,
I thought I'd add a little something that may be helpful in the future. At school we do charcoal value drawings before we're allowed to paint our pictures. We use acetate to tranfer the drawings to the canvas. I always hang onto the acetate, and then if I mess up, I can lay the acetate back over the canvas to check my drawing. Of course, that's assuming the drawing is correct in the first place. I think taking the time to get the drawing correct saves a lot of hassle in the painting process. Plus you have the advantage of having your values figured out ahead of time.
Debra

Thank you Rob. This is so cool - it helps a lot. I'm not going to be able to actually apply any of this until this weekend but I will definitely be posting my results from it. Can't wait. But in the meantime I wanted to say thank you!

Julie

Woo hoo!
 

Finally done! Rob et al, I want to thank you for your help on this. I've given it over to his parents and they love it! Whew!

I'll be posting pictures later tonight.

Thanks again!

Here is the completed painting
 

Okay, here's the final piece. As per my usual underwhelming photographing and photoshop skills, the colors look a bit darkish and overbearing. His parents loved it and are very happy. (whew...deep breath.)

Thanks again for all advice, feedback, etc. I can't tell you how much it all helped.

All right, Julie!!!
 

Great job, Julie! I'm so glad everything worked out on this one in the end... especially the part about happy clients!

Thanks for allowing me to be a second set of eyes on this one. We all need that at some time or another.

After this piece, the next one will be even easier! Well, sometimes that's true. I mean, lightning can strike twice. I remember learning that the last time I visited NCAR. ;)

Um. I work at NCAR. Did I mention that on this site? Or is that just a coincidence?

Thanks for the help!

It says so on your website, Julie.

I'm kind of a weather geek (note the clouds behind me in my avatar - that's one of a dozen cloud paintings of mine), so I thought it was totally cool that you worked there. Hope you don't mind that I mentioned it!

I illustrated a weather book for kids a while back. It's called "Can It Rain Cats And Dogs" by Melvin and Gilda Berger, published by Scholastic. Not my best work, but it was fun. I'm a much better cloud painter now. I took Meteorology 101 and 102 as my science requirement for my BFA, and it's been very helpful to have that knowledge.

Talk to you soon!