Anna

[Chris Saper]

Garth,

I just love your composition! And her fresh attitude.

A couple of comments:

The shadow cast by her nose on the cheek is probably too dark. Photos taken outside in direct light generally greatly compress the darks (and the lights). With that wonderful cast shadow, you have an opportunity to exploit the edge quality of the cast shadow, making its edge sharper toward the nose, and progressively softer as the shadow moves into the cheek.Same with that tiny triangle of light SW of her lower lip.

You might soften the line that comprises the mouth's corner on our right.

There are a few of tangents you can fix very easily: the place where the knot on the tree kisses the wisp of hair, and again where the same wisp connects with the upward crinkle of her shirt. Actually you could lose that crinkle, I think, without diminishing her body language. There is a dark triangle at the right of her neck on our right that connects rather lineally with the collar. By curving the hair, you could get rid of it pretty easily.

I feel you have really managed the shadows on our left side of the face very well. The darker values in the light - tree dapple; shadow along the edge of her neck on our right; lower cheek on our right; chin... seem to be a bit purple, and colder than they need to be...a desaturated green would probably do the trick, and not be as extreme a temperature difference.

Lastly, the shirt. It would be likely that it would throw a bit of reflected color up into the shadow of her jaw on our left. The reds of the shirt seem to be darkened in the shadows perhaps with black, which is a great cooling agent, but the shirt is not as integrated with the rest of the painting as it might be. You could desaturate the reds (in the shadows) with green to help integrate the surface colors. Lastly (I am getting fairly picky, hope you like picky, because I do when I get my paintings critiqued) the edges of the v neck of the shirt might be a bit sharp, and transition a bit abruptly with the creamy aspect of her throat.

All of that being said , I really like your portrait!