Baby Johann

[Terri Ficenec]

It's a little scary to do, but often you can gently scrape back ridges with the edge of a palette knife.

Your avatar is the little picture of yourself that appears on your posts.

[Alice Leggett]

A tip I learned from Richard Whitney: Use a curved-blade X-acto knife to scrape down dried paint ridges for layering over.

I do believe in getting the proportions right the first time, but I think everyone has to make adjustments along the way.

[Rob Sullivan]

Julie -

Sorry I came into this thread late, but if you are still open to some help, I'd like to share my assessments and perhaps some Photoshop manipulations to guide you further.

The advice you've recieved thus far has been spot on with regards to drawing and contrast corrections, etc. I've taken the liberty of further breaking down your latest posted image into sections in order to show where there needs to be some hue shifts and saturation changes, along with a few small things that are important to fully realizing the likeness.

But before I post these things, I'd like to ask for your permission to do so. It's pretty much for the same reason that I ask my students if I may draw/paint on their work to show them the practical application of the process - just a matter of respect for personal property, really.

So let me know - hope things are going well with this one! Scraping the work down is scary, but once you do it, it's never scary again!

[Julie Gerleman]

Thanks for doing that, Rob, and thanks for asking. I didn't need to scrape, as it turns out, and I went ahead and re-did the eyes so that they're closer to reality. I think it looks much better now and I'm very interested in hearing your take. I'm more comfortable (and better at) negotiating values but am still pretty intimidated by hues and saturation - color, generally, still freaks me out.

So post away, and thanks.

[Rob Sullivan]

I'm actually in the midst of P-shopping some other things for a Digital Illustration class I'm currently teaching. I'm so not qualified for it, but they talked me into it. Weird, huh, considering what I'd said about the MFA requirement, as posted in the Cafe. They'l let me teach something I'm not qualified for, but they won't let me teach something I am qualified for in BFA. Okay, that's off-topic :P

I designated 4 areas A, B, C and D, plus a wee arrow to show a drawing change. I did re-draw and re-position the eyes. The mouth I moved just a tad, and put it on its proper plane.

Area "A" was too warm, saturated with an orange hue. It is true there are areas of great warmth in the transitions across the "terminator" (the line that separates the dark and light planes), but this warmth was dominating the entire core shadow. I poly-lassoed it and hue shifted towards red, desaturated it quite a bit and knocked back the contrasts.

Area "B" sort of has the opposite problem. This is interesting, because in indoor light situations, the reflected lights in the head have a tendency to be cooler (or at least, more neutral, thus percieved cooler), as the main light is generally warm (especially in incandescent light). However, your main light is coming from outside! It is not cool, but what happens is that it bounces of interor objects back into the head on the shadow side and becomes quite warm in areas of saturated skin tone (ball of nose, cheek and chin, for instance). "B" was too neutral/ochre so I increased the saturation a little bit, and shifted it towards red.

There are some places in these broad areas where I had to add back or subtract away warmth because of small specific instances of these temperature changes. The cheek on the lower right side of "A" is an example of where I had de-saturated it along with the rest of "A", but there still needed to be warmth there, as the middle third of the face always has the most pigmentation (warm colors).

"C" is important to getting the jaw to separate a bit better from the sweater. His head casts a shadow here, so I darkened it (and de-saturated the blue a bit, as this is what happens in shadow).

I did the opposite to "D", as it seperates his little chubby cheek from the collar. I lightened it, thus bringing out the edge plane of the cheek rounding underneath the jaw line.

And the turquoise-colored arrow indicates a small drawing change. His head shape is more squared-off here than in your original. This helps with likeness a lot, getting more specific with the baby's particular profile (these little guys don't have the hair to hide their profiles!).

Hope this helps, Julie!

[Debra Norton]

Julie,
I thought I'd add a little something that may be helpful in the future. At school we do charcoal value drawings before we're allowed to paint our pictures. We use acetate to tranfer the drawings to the canvas. I always hang onto the acetate, and then if I mess up, I can lay the acetate back over the canvas to check my drawing. Of course, that's assuming the drawing is correct in the first place. I think taking the time to get the drawing correct saves a lot of hassle in the painting process. Plus you have the advantage of having your values figured out ahead of time.
Debra

[Julie Gerleman]

Thank you Rob. This is so cool - it helps a lot. I'm not going to be able to actually apply any of this until this weekend but I will definitely be posting my results from it. Can't wait. But in the meantime I wanted to say thank you!

Julie