Marie in acrylic
 

This is a painting of the mother of my sister

What a terrific face!
 

Hi Holly,

This woman looks so alive on your canvas. I think you've done a wonderful job of working with the various warms and cools in her face.

Acrylics are supposed to be hard to work with, especially in portraiture. Did you find this to be true for you?

You might want to tone down that background because it's busy and I feel it interferes with her face.

Thanks for posting this.

Best wishes,
Linda

Holly,

What a wonderful portrait! Has your sister's mother-in-law seen your rendition? Like Linda, I've heard that rendering skin is much more difficult in acrylic than in oil. How do you handle these challenges in such a quick drying medium?

Did you have to work from photos, or were you able to do some of it from life? I agree with Linda that the background needs to be toned down a bit. It has a tremendous amount of movement that somewhat distracts from the wonderful face of your subject. I love your color pallete, by the way.

Dear Holly,

Her face is beautiful and extremely lively. To think you used Acrylics is amazing.

While you are toning down the background, I would look at her blouse again. These are only tweaking suggestions. The sleeve opening on our right seems off. The fold towards her neck and background could come down slightly.

How's this?
 

Linda and Valerie.

Thank you very much. This is a surprise to my sister's brother, as it is hard for him to be so far from his family in Africa. I will probably never have the opportunity to see his Mom or his family. I'm hoping that if he does not see the portrait and his Mom side-by-side, the fact that I rendered her skin tone too light won't be so obvious.

The only medium I've ever tried is acrylic, and I suspect that it does take more work blending and so forth. However, I tend to play with colors on the canvas, knowing that if something doesn't work, I can easily paint over it. I'd have to have a much better grasp of colors to work in oils, to be able to get it right the first time so as not to create mud.

I'm attaching two Photoshop modified backgrounds. The first has the coloring lightened and desaturated. In the second I also blurred out the brushstrokes. Are either of these what you were suggesting? If so, I was thinking of doing a wash with a gray mixture of burnt umber and white.

Thanks again,

Background lightened, desaturated, and blurred.

Enzie,

I agree the right arm is bad, it's certainly been bothering me. Her top was hanging off on our right side in the photo, covering her shoulder, which was distracting, so I attempted to move it up. I'll move the fold down, that will help.

Thank you,

This is the updated version, hope it is better.

Holly, I was very impressed with this portrait. The skin tones and planes of the face are tremendous. I've done some digital alterations to the background which will seem drastic at first but i'm only attempting to correct a lighting situation. The light appears to be the strongest on the furthest eye, so the light has to end behind the subjects left shoulder, therefore the background behind the right shoulder should be darker. I eydropped some of the dark tones from the subjects hair and airbrushed them in for this effect, though crude, the alteration helps me make my point. The problem with the right arm may be corrected with sharpening the left shoulder and making the right recede, the right arm is a tone brighter than the left even though the left is closer to the viewer. These alterations are only one artists observations and are not etched in stone. Keep up the great art!

Paul Burns

Thank you Paul. I really like your background, it's more dramatic and makes her face pop out more. I originally had a dark background and similar pointed light source in mind for this portrait, but somehow I lost track of that idea over time. Thanks for taking the time to point it out to me.

Regards,