Morgan

[Mike McCarty]

Mai,

I humbly accept your suggestions and will take them into consideration.

As mentioned in the first post, I made some modifications to the subject's left cheek after taking these photos. As for the eyes...I have had a particularly hard time with these. I have made some improvements but am still not satisfied. One of my goals for this project was to not blend as much as I usually want to do. I usually, in the close quarters of the eyes, will touch my sharp little tortillion to the chalk and then paint it on like touching a brush to paint and then to canvas. I am able to have a better sight of where I am making the touch using the slender paper stump. Here I have tried to go directly to the paper with the stick. This is much harder for me. It does give a nice (at least different) look. It doesn't matter much if they don't end up looking like normal eyes.

It is my practice to get to about 90% and then take photos of the work. I am always amazed at the mistakes I can spot immediately when looking at a photo of the work. It seems an odd thing but it most always happens that way. I then take a bit of a break and ponder what I have done and then go after it again.

Of course this was done from a photo. There were some interesting discussions regarding the cropping of this subject in the "photo resource critique" section titled "interesting light." I decided to paint the full image (even more than the biggest image above) with the idea that I could always cut it down if I wanted. With the cost of custom framing for this type of work the cropped version has a certain appeal.