Bridal Portrait

[Brian McDaniel]

Here is one of my latest paintings. It is 20x24, oil on canvas.

Any thoughts, comments, suggestions on colors, composition, rendering etc are welcome.

I will post a close-up in the following message.

[Brian McDaniel]

And here she is up close. Trying to show both the face and the detail of the shoulder of her dress.

[Brian McDaniel]

The veil gave me alot of trouble on this. How do you folks think I did in handling it? I tried to keep it discreet for the most part and just bring in highlights where the light hit the front edges of it. Im thinking those edges may have been a bit too bright. Any thoughts on that?

[Steven Sweeney]

The drawing is generally excellent, good placement and proportioning, good job on foreshortening the lower arm. The detail in the gown and bouquet exhibits great observation (and a lot of patience!), and the hair is nicely handled.

There are a few areas in the drawing that you might review:

1-- The brow seems a bit too thick, high and prominent. In a full head profile like this, I'd expect to see the eyebrows -- which sit forward of the eyes on the upper rim of the eye sockets, between which the brow turns under to meet the nose -- extend at least to the front edge of the face. (Otherwise it appears that there's a substantial vertical bulge in the brow between the eyebrows.) I'm not sure "from where I sit" if the solution lies in reshaping the brow, moving the eye, or extending the eyebrow. While we're looking at that area, the angle at which the brow meets the top of the nose looks a bit too sharp, unusual in a female.

2-- The narrow shadow stripe by which you separate the eyelid from the shadow on the side of the nose is too dark and extends too high, suggesting a deep crease or signficant fold in the flesh, but at that point -- above the influence of the eyeball orb -- the skin would be smooth and not interrupted by that sudden dark stripe.

3-- The jawbone appears short, but this is tricky, because I'm quite sure the effect is created by her slightly downturned head, which causes the flesh at the front of the neck to bunch up a little and suggest a "false" jaw. What to do? I would lie a little. I'd shave off that entire crescent of reflected light (more about which, later) along the bottom of the jaw. This would have the flattering effect of tightening up the skin on that jawline, and also move the turn of the jaw slightly aft of its unfortunate siting right where the front of the neck meets the jaw.

4-- The pearl necklace doesn't seem to fall downward as quickly as I'd expect. Cover up the last two or three pearls and see if the necklace doesn't seem to better hang (even if we can't actually see it!) with the correct weight.

Believe it or not, I didn't start out here intending to talk about drawing at all. I wanted to focus on the very very dark darks in the painting, both on the figure and in the background. The shadows underneath the cheekbone and on the back of the head, neck, shoulders and arms look to me to be just too dark and drained of the emotions of color.

The darkest patches of shadow also create a problem with overmodeling, by which I mean forcing into one area too many shapes with too great a values extension. The cheekbone is one area, and the model's left arm is definitely another. In the latter, you could completely remove the darkest shadow tone (except perhaps where the bouquet casts a shadow) and not only not lose form, but gain a great deal. A similar problem occurs on the neck, below the ear. The overmodeling, the dark shadow stripe against the lighter adjacent areas, also suggests a crease in the flesh that wouldn't be there; the skin below and behind the ear joins the skin of the neck smoothly.

In a nutshell, lighten up your shadow areas. Only in a darkened room would Caucasian flesh be that dark. You're forfeiting the beauty in half your figure. And the point of my going on at length here is that this is a very beautiful subject, generally well rendered, on what would be (it is hoped) a "lighted" day, an illuminated event. I think that but for the dampening effect of the dark shadow areas, and the lack of color in the darkest background darks, the event might have been captured even more effectively.

By the way, since you asked about the veil, I think it's pretty good, but could use some variation in the way it's influenced by the light. For example, we'd expect it to be brighter in the light that is coming over the woman's left shoulder. Try scumbling some light onto one or two areas of the veil, using the tooth of the canvas if possible, to suggest the net shear of the veil. And in the shadow areas, we'd expect to lose that bright edge here and there.

Hope some of this seems useful.

Steven

[Brian McDaniel]

Steven,

Thanks for the reply and spending so much time critiquing my work. Its funny, the drawing of the face gave me a lot of trouble. Mostly that profile. In the photo, the chin didn't seem to shape that way. When I drew it out like the photo, it looked horrible. I kept adjusting and changing until it looked right, but not like the photo. I guess thats the fallacy of photo reference. That funny dark line seperating the eye from the nose was in the reference, and I did find it to be rather odd. I suppose I should've worked towards lessening it, rather than rendering it all the way.

I actually did lessen the lines in the neck. With her head turned as it is, there are folds in the skin there. I didn't like the idea of totally removing them, since when you turn your head, folds are naturally created. I could've left them a bit softer though.

Sometimes, (or maybe all the time) I do get carried away with those shadows. I like to get 'em nice and deep, probably too deep. Something I need to work on. Especially creating those shadows with color, rather than just with darker browns. (there is actually quite a bit of blue and green in those shadows, but it is over quite a bit of burnt umber)

Thanks again for your input. Every painting is a learning process.

[Steven Sweeney]

You're welcome, Brian. Remember that I'm two steps removed from the live subject, so if you're seeing something different from the way I am, you're the final judge.

After I posted my critique, I was looking at my son, whose head was turned toward me, and I noticed the slight, rising creases in the neck. (I turned my own head and felt the same effect, but decided that didn't count, because I also consider cheesecake and Snickers to be primary food groups, so of course the flesh on my neck will crease when I turn my head.) Nonetheless, it's still that dark shadow, especially distinct and darker in value in the stripe of skin between the two dark creases and coming very far forward on the neck, toward the light, that caught my eye.

I mention it simply for purposes of also passing along something that Peggy Baumgaertner talks about in one of her instructional videos. Apparently one of her instructors felt that too many students were automatically reaching for the umbers for every shadow, so he made them all remove those and other dark earth "non-colors" from their palettes and figure out ways to mix up "real" colors for their shadows. I merely pass that along, I can't say much more about it from my own experience (which actually isn't very substantial.) Experiment with light red, Indian red, and caput mortuum in various mixtures. (Sneak the raw umber back on later; it's useful for glazing.)

My own observation is that it's an *extremely* rare shadow that even approaches black. Save those very darkest darks for accents (the "dark" counterpart of highlights) to be carefully used within shadows.

[Brian McDaniel]

Very good suggestions, thank you. I am looking very hard at those big fat tubes of burnt umber and burnt sienna and wondering why I go through so much of them. Time to set them aside a bit more and let colors do my talking.

Thanks for the help.