|
Mark, Denise and Mari,
Thanks very much for taking the time to comment on this painting. It's been really illuminating in several ways. I saw immediately that the jpeg as posted was off in color. It does read as almost a sepia-toned flesh/hair combination in the post, but the painting is not nearly this uniform. I've spent almost enough time trying to digitally correct it as I would need to paint another one, and I'm still unable to get it to look like the original. I've looked at it on four different computer/monitor combinations and each one has its idiosyncracies.
For the record, the fleshtones were painted using raw umber, titanium white, raw sienna, yellow ochre, cad. red medium, ivory black and terre verte. The hair was done using burnt umber, indian yellow, alizarin crimson, titanium white and ivory black. In the actual painting the skin has a distinctly more olive cast than the hair. Kim is Asian, and her skin has a different color than the typical Caucasian skin.
The jpeg in the post was shot using my son's Sony digital camera, downloaded in jpeg format to a Toshiba laptop, loaded to a floppy disc, transferred to an older Mac clone, resized to conform to the forum requirements, and finally attached to the post. Somewhere along the line it got more red everywhere, and there seems to be nothing I can do about it. But I can have Kim stand next to the actual painting, and everyone agrees that the skin color is a pretty good match, and so is the hair (although it is dyed and tipped, not her natural color).
I think what I'm getting at here is that there are limits to the amount of help that can be offered through cyberspace. For anything other than the more obvious aspects it requires that we have an accurate reproduction of the original. When I go to apply the suggestions to the painting itself I have my doubts. I would guess that the fix would be to have more complementary colors in the shadows and in the mid tones of the more lighted areas. I've tried this digitally to some extent, but the effect has not been encouraging, and I'm not excited about repeating the experiment with paint. I think the best I can do at this point is to bear the advice in mind for future paintings.
I'll post a detail and some of the reference material in the hope that it may clarify the earlier discussion about Mark's points and some of my comments above.
Here is the eye detail, hopefully showing some of what is missing or not apparent in the original jpeg
|