Beautiful Dutch girl, no earring
 

I don't want to over-work this, but if there is something I can do to improve it before I put it away, I'd love to hear about it. Yes, it's Sam again.

Thanks a bunch, Janet

Hi Janet,
It's a beautiful piece of work. My concerns are with the color values on the painting. If the photo-shot of the artwork is how it's like in the actual painting, then i would like to say that the right side (our right side) is just as bright as the left side.
Darkening the right face a little would dramatically enhance the painting. Give it some thought and see if it helps. :sunnysmil

Nice - the thing that jumped out at me is the catch light on her right eye -seems too big compared to the photo.

The cools in the original photo are lovely. You have made it quite warm in comparison. That is OK, but i would prefer the cools.
You have captured a good likeness, but I would really zoom in on those beautiful eyes & tweak them to perfection.
You have not quite captured them. - but you are soooo close.
Don't stop. This is quite beautiful.

I really like the way you move the paint.

Hi Janet!
This is lovely.
As for the eyes, I see that you have made the irises just a tad larger than they are in the photo. The top lid on her right eye has an ever so slight point at the top of it's arch in the photo. In your painting it is a perfectly round arch. And the blue of the iris is lighter in the photo. Especially in her right eye.
I also like the way you paint. It feels very loose and playful. Very nice!

Nice painting, you're getting close, but need to be more precise with the shapes of the eyes and lips.

Hi guys,

Thanks so much for your thoughts. I really wanted to make this painting special. I went out for breakfast, then for a little drive in the country, got your input and went straight to work. Phew. At least two hours work and it doesn't look like much at all.

Marcus: I lowered the values in the light areas of her face on the one side a little . Let's call it a compromise. You are right, of course, but I am as yet unwilling to go as far as the photo reference calls for.

Cynthia: The first thing I dealt with was that catch light. I promise that I will never, never do it again.

Tricia: Painting flesh overly warm is a problem of mine that I am working on. I will go some way towards blaming my tools in that I think the original post was too warm. I took the pic on the south side of the house in the shade, this one I took on the north side. Anyway, I am aware of my need to use more cools. Thanks.

Brenda: I worked hard on the eyes. I will look at them again tomorrow. Right now I'm going to work on a landscape. Big brushes. No eyelids.

Michele: Thanks. Please let me know how I did.

Better but still not quite right. Most artists have a tendency to try to level things out, as if the face was straight on, and straight up and down. This is happening especially with the mouth and the near eye.

Michele, yeah I see what you mean. Phooey. I'll work at it this week and try to get it right. Thanks again, Janet

Janet,
I have been working on a portrait and today I had to scrub out the whole face and start the features all over again. Everything was out of wack just enough to make referencing impossible! At least you are very close to your goal. It's the result that matters, after all, not the number of hours we work on it. Can you imagine if paintings in museums or galleries had little tags on them like "had to re-do ear six times" or "the nostrils were impossible"?
You just sounded a little disheartened so I wanted to cheer you up and encourage you.

This I'd like to see!

Thanks Brenda. Too funny! I wasn't really discouraged, I think I know what I'm in for with this whole portraiture thing. You know the real irony of what you said: not only can you not draw attention to the fact that you repaint the ear 6 times, you must make it look like once was effortless and that the nostrils were a cinch. Thanks for the encouragement anyway, and good luck on your endeavor.

Janet

Well, here she is again. Let me know how I did. I really REALLY knocked myself out on those two or three square centimetres!

Thanks, Janet

Better, however there are still a few more things:

The lower edge of the eye on our left needs to come down more. The "line between the lips" needs to come down more also on the far left side. That line also needs to be softened as it moves out beyond the lips at the left end. Also watch the tip of the nose. There needs to be a slightly darker shape on the tip of it, to make that cute turned up nose that she has. And be sure you don't lose the nice dimple to the right of the mouth. It's almost gone.

I've been known to paint features five times over to get them right!

Michele, I feel guilty for getting all this great advice for free. Do you take Canuck Bucks? Seriously, it's odd how as soon as you point something out, it's like oh yeah, how come I didn't see that? I was going to suggest that you consider teaching, but I was going through a thread this morning that indicated you do teach. Anyway, thanks for the coaching that you have provided. Here are my (our) results.

Hi Janet,

I've been nit-picking and I'm posting what I see.
For me, it is so hard to see these tiny things in my own work the first or second time through. It always helps to have more sets of eyes!

I guess I would use the reference of the pupil to pupil line, as it looks like you've got it pretty much right on.
In your painting it seems the right upper eye lid looks a bit thick. And the line of the lower lid on that eye is a bit different than the photo. The nose may not be slanted enough. The break in the line of the lips is more exaggerated. Her left eye is a bit rounder than the photo.

Ok, I'll put my microscope away now. :D

Brenda,

I'm sure that you are a very busy lady and the time you have taken to nitpick is greatly appreciated. Don't put that microscope anywhere that you can't retrieve it easily. Maybe you could let me know how to take these pics off the posting and onto my hard drive so that I can really see what you have done. It's a little small for my failing eyes.

Thanks much, Janet

Janet,
If you have a PC, just right click on the image and "save picture as" and then name it and save it to your desktop. These are small images, so they may get pixelly if you blow them up. Hopefully you have Photoshop or Photoshop elements.
I don't know much about Macs.

-Brenda

Hi Brenda,

Sorry, Mac all the way. I'll try poking around with it and see what I can do.

Janet

Brenda,
I wonder if it would not be easier to see the differences if you use the same drawing in blue on both the ref. and the painting. Superimpose the blue lines from the ref. upon the painting to illustrate the differences.

Janet,
It also works to open another page with the forum and make both pages small and place them side by side. Then you look forth and back between the ref. and painting. :) ;)

Allan

Allan,
Yes it would be easier! Sometimes my brain does not engage. Janet if you havePhotoshop this is something you could do on your computer too. Use the line tool to line out certain problem features in the photograph and then group the layers of lines together without the photograph and move the group of lines over to your painting. This will show you discrepancies. the line tool is good because it makes straight lines.

Janet,
If I remember correctly from the distant past, on a Mac you draw a rectangle around the image with your mouse and then somewhere there is a "take a picture" option and you click on that and a picture gets put somewehre on your hard drive. I don't know where though and I don't know how to change where it puts it.

Brenda,

I just dragged and dropped the pics onto a new Photoshop document. Then I traced your reference lines on the painting with the pen tool and pasted them onto the photo. Voila, all my drawing crimes revealed.

It has taken a bit of time to get back to this one. I had to learn 2 things first: how to use cool flesh colours better than I had been doing; and second, the confidence to know that I had more than one left eye in me per painting. The first I addressed by doing a Bouguereau copy from a high rez download from ARC. The second thing, I guess I just got tired of trying to fix features that were wrong in the first place. Not to say that I'm "there" yet, but I think that poring over the threads on this site and cyber-stalking great artists, modern and contemporary, has done a world of good. Now, with luck, those of you who coached me through this is the first place will see at least some progress.

Thanks again, Janet

Hi Janet,

I really llike what you've been doing here and I love the way you're handling the paint and cooling the light side. Just a couple of things... does she have colored contact lenses or is that really her eye color? Either way, I feel the blue is a little startling and I would try to try to tone it down as much as possible without losing her character. Try to get some soft edges around the eye if you can. About her nostrils: is that raw umber? Try for a warm color for body openings, nostrils, corners of mouths, ears, etc.

Also, I often leave out neck folds altogether and it still looks very natural in a painting, especially in women. Go take a look at some Sargents and see what I mean. Photography accentuates line where in real life form meets form and value meets value in a much more subtle manner. The eye can be drawn to hard lines in paintings anyway and you want to manage the viewer's attention. Here, your lines come off as stripes in a Nearly Headless Nick effect. Remember that you are the aesthetic boss of your painting, not the photo!

You've really caught her character here, nice job. And really nice hair, too, soft and convincing colors.

Janet,

The skin tones are much more life-like this time around!

I agree with Linda about the neck lines. I would also take a bit of the darkest color of the hair and blend in at the forhead more to soften that edge right at her part. I think the hair looks lovely, but blondes especially seem to have a lot of cools in their hair (grays and blues)...just something to consider.

Edit - Im going to take that back about the cools in the hair since now that I look again you do have them. It may be the darkest area that Im drawn to - wanting to see it as cooler.

Well, ladies, the changes here are by and large pretty subtle. If you can't see them, I guess they are too subtle. Hairline at centre part: done. More cool in the dark part of the hair: done. Neck stripes: gone. Eye edges softened a little: done. Thanks you guys for taking the time to pick on the little things that make so much difference.

As for the colour of her eyes, they are quite startling in real life; depending on the light I have never been able to decide whether they look like glacial meltwater or tropical lagoons. Hopefully softening them up has made them jump out less. And the neck creases - I looked up Sargent on this and no, I don't imagine he ever allowed a crease to sully those languid, elegant subjects of his. Since you both mentioned it, is it because paying lady customers don't like to see them? Included are some of the prettiest neck creases I have ever seen, just to stir it up a little.

Nicely done. All the studing and changes you've been doing have made a lot of difference.

Good idea to do the Bougereau copy in order to work on your skintones too. I was intently studying an exquisite Bougereau at a museum today and really noticed how cool the skintones were.

Hi Janet,

I just came upon this thread, which has obviously been going on for some time. I am so impressed with your persistence and the improvements you have made. You've gotten such excellent advice from the experts, too!

I think the way you approached this (and your other work), challenging yourself to draw from what you see, couldn't be more helpful for you in the long run. If you run into trouble, those photoshop techniques are invaluable for pinpointing where you have gone wrong. I think that elusive likeness problem has happened to most artists at different times. I use the wierd and probably goofy looking method of smiling at my paintings and seeing if they smile back. If it's not quite them, i.e., if the nostril is a bit snarly and the mouth a bit droopy, I try to be really honest with myself and not gloss it over. Then I try to figure out what has caused the problem, by looking back and forth between the person or reference, and the painted image. It's usually the problem that was mentioned: the tendency to straighten out everything.

Every time you paint this fascinating girl your painting improves by leaps and bounds. It's exciting to see.

Alex

Michele, thank you so much for nitpicking away at the little things, because you have demonstrated to me how I have to be with myself. It's a constant process of questioning and requestioning and never accepting "good enough". Oh, and the AGO has a [I]gorgeous[I] Bouguereau that I spent a long time studying a couple of weeks ago. I wonder if our painting teachers at OCA knew about what was essentially in the backyard...if they did, they kept it a big secret from me. (Note: it seems Michele and I went to school together about 100 years ago.)

Alex, thank you too for your excellent advice and support. (Good grief, I feel like I'm on the podium accepting the Big Award. Please excuse.) I'm seeing that maybe one of the great things about this forum is the "peer group". Mostly friends don't understand and family are a bit tired of it, so it's nice to get to hang with people who find the same things to be important.

Cheers, guys. Janet

Janet,
This is coming out so beautifully, it has been fun to see what you have learned and then applied. The only thing I could add, since I too, am learning, is that actually using Indian Red in a dark value in the nostrils and the deep creases of the eyelid look very "authentic". I believe that is what Bouguereau used, it is a deep, warm red.

Hi Patricia, thanks. Isn't it funny to find ourselves "beginners" again? Not so bad, really. Yeah, I actually reddened up the nostrils a bit (I use Terra Rosa, Indian Red behaves very badly around me). The eyelid crease thing looks okay in Bouguereau's work, but Sam has a lot of greeny-grey going on around her eyelids, I'd be apprehensive about going too red there. Howbe this: I won't be able to get to this again for a couple of weeks, so it will be quite dry on the surface and I'll try, see how it looks. Take care, Janet