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Kim,
What a terrible experience for your beautiful daughter. Be sure to tell her she has a big fan club here on the Forum, okay? You'll create such wonderful paintings with her as your subject.
Mary,
Most of my commissioned work is outdoor portraiture, so I hear you on this one. I think outdoor portraits are terrific; I just think they're harder to do well, for a lot of reasons. Believe me, I've spent a lot of time lately thinking ("stewing" is a better word) about this. A well lit indoor portrait shows subtle value and color changes that aren't as evident outdoors. The thrill of an outdoor portrait is in the color and temperature changes; the thrill of an indoor portrait is the subtle three dimensionality of the form. (Or, the dramatic three dimensionality of the form, as the case may be.)
If you wander through the SOG gallery you can look at how different artists handle this. When I see a lot of subtle modeling in an oudoor portrait I always suspect that the subject was shot inside and an outdoor scene was inserted later. I used to be vehemently against this but (just for the record) I'm starting to recant. I really LIKE controlling everything that's going on in my painting. Besides, indoor light is more flattering to many faces. Children look good anywhere, of course. Definitely, try shooting your daughter inside and putting a landscape in the background, just to see if it you can paint it believably - so that the viewer thinks you really did paint her outside.
Color and atmosphere are so important. To me, indoors is "intense" and outdoors is "fresh and lively". I am even going so far as to use a different color palette in indoor work than I am in outdoor work. A few years ago I was concentrating on plein air landscapes and I think that experience really helped me "see" the outside. As a portrait painter you have additional challenges because you can't just go to the local open studio for practise and paint the model under indoor light (either natural or electric). You have to get a model out there in the back yard and paint some flesh from life in the fresh air, and translate what you've learned from that exercise when you paint from outdoor photos of your subject.
I was at a museum recently where there were ten (wonderful) brooding, dark, dramatic indoor portraits and one (wonderful) light, fresh, colorful outdoor portrait. I think it was a Frank Benson. I stood and watched for a while as the entering crowd invariably went and clustered around the painting that was full of light and color. Now, this may mean nothing more than the fact that the museum was in Maine and nobody had seen the sun for weeks, so everyone was pulled to the warm and fresh painting. But that painting just radiated that sense of "outside".
Personally, I'm in the process of moving subjects inside, in part because I now have the space to get a good setup. I just have to figure out how to get up there and control all that light coming from my skylights.
Sorry to ramble on like this, it's a subject I've been pondering lately.
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