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Old 03-08-2003, 11:56 PM   #10
Karin Wells Karin Wells is offline
FT Pro, Mem SOG,'08 Cert Excellence PSA, '02 Schroeder Portrait Award Copley Soc, '99 1st Place PSA, '98 Sp Recognition Washington Soc Portrait Artists, '97 1st Prize ASOPA, '97 Best Prtfolio ASOPA
 
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Joined: Jun 2001
Location: Peterborough, NH
Posts: 1,114
This is going to be a wonderful portrait!
Quote:
I just did not know how to paint the values light enough and still have a good balance of the light and the shadows. I suppose this can be learned with practice.
Practice really is your best teacher. You might find that your eyesockets are a bit dark even though they seem "balanced" now, they won't be later. Underpainting tends to be more about accurate halftones than the final balance between light and dark.

In your underpainting, the darks are not supposed to be as dark as the final darks and your lights are not supposed to be as light as the final lights.

That is, when the underpainting (grisaille) is all done, you will add more paint to your upper layers as you get into color. That is, thin warm darks added to your shadows will make them even darker. And the build up of thick warm light and the final cool highlights will appear to make your light in the underpainting areas even lighter. The addition of these final layers will upset the "balance" that you worked so hard for and will require extra time and effort to correct.

Caution: A scumble of zinc white will cool your painting more than it will lighten it. Oftentimes this can makes your dark areas cold and dead.

You can certainly work with what you have and it is a beautiful painting, but I would like to see the range of values in your underpainting be much more narrow as in the example below.

I added a square of black and a square of white for comparison so that you can clearly see how narrow the range is and that there is plenty of room here to build light....and plenty of room to deepen shadow.

A general way to describe underpainting is to say that you begin in the middle and work in two opposite directions...toward light and toward shadow.
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