Please evaluate?

[Dean Lapinel]

Portrait of my daughter done initially as a pencil sketch then followed by photo to capture colors. Comments?

http://www.cableone.net/deloid/laur2_400x300.jpg

[Cynthia Daniel]

I love the mood and feeling Dean. I will leave technical comments to the artists. However, I thought you might be interested in seeing a candlelight portrait by Jerry Yang who is on my web site. I've always liked the candlelight mood of this painting.

http://www.portraitartist.com/yang/candlelight2.htm

[Brian McDaniel]

I like the mood and overall feel of this painting. I like the rather 'rough' stylized way the hands, hair, shirt & arms are done. I like the colors and the expression that youve captured on her face. (I know, youre waiting for the but....)

The skin tones on her face seem a bit too blotchy. In one respect, and perhaps in seeing the actual painting, it might work out that way quite nicely. But from here, it seems to me that if the face had been blended just a bit smoother, it would have created a nicer contact point for the viewers eye.

But thats just a nit-picky point. I think its a nice looking painting.

[Cynthia Daniel]

Brian,

I looked at the portrait image under magnification in my graphics program and there's a lot of pixelation occurring. Could be the scan is not the best.

Also, perhaps there's some light reflections from the photographic process combined with a very painterly style. I've noticed sometimes that when artists that have a very painterly style photograph their work, that the "painterly" quality can sometimes go a bit rough looking between the photo developing and the scanning each increasing the contrast.

Just possibilities. I could be completely off base.

Dean, what DPI did you use to scan? I assume you saved it as a .jpg. Often people compress too much and this will cause pixelation. There's an option on saving a .jpg as to level of compression. You may already know.

[Dean Lapinel]

Cynthia,

Thanks for your comments. I used a digital camera to photograph then directly placed it on my harddrive. I had to shrink the pixels quite a bit to have the photo accepted by the forum automated process. Any tips on posting better photos as I have a new one I'd like to post?


Brian,
The life-size portrait doesn't have those blotches that are quite obvious on the photo you can see. I was most curious about how you and other accomplished artists would take the intentional loose strokes of the hair and arms. I felt that in the dim light one shouldn't notice the detail a much of these components.


Thanks

[Cynthia Daniel]

Dean,

I don't mind the loose strokes in the hair, but besides the fact that I liked the portrait overall, my second feeling was a desire for more form and definition in the hands.

[Brian McDaniel]

In viewing this photo of it, I really like the loose, somewhat 'blocky' look of the hands and really, most everything except the candle & face. I think, when a stylized approach is done well, it looks great. I feel as though there is just enough form in those hands, shirt etc to easily allow the viewer to know what they are; then allow their eyes to quickly move to the subjects face.

I think its a nice job youve done here. Now get us a better picture next time! Just be sure to NOT compress the jpg when you save it. you can still meet the pixel requirements here and keep the quality of your image reasonably high.

[Cynthia Daniel]

Brian,

This is too funny. The hands don't bother you, but the face and candle do and I'm just the opposite.

Dean,

I've allowed for a quite large file size to be uploaded, so I'm not sure why you're having problems. I recently increased this because you said you were having difficulty with the file size limitation. To figure out why you're having a problem, I'd have to know every step you're doing along the way. Or email me your original file before you did anything to it and let me examine that first.

As an example of what's possible, here's a portrait by one of my artists that is 20kb (20,000 bytes) and the quality is quite good. That's only about 20% of the original max file size I had set before I reset larger for you.

[John de la Vega]

An exciting painting overall, Dean, with what it looks to be a lot of essence and personality.. I agree with most of the comments, the painterly treatment being a major plus. Yes there are elements I could be picky about, such as the lack of shadow under the hand not holding the pen/pencil (?), which makes the hand form look a bit 'fuller' than it could be.

Your treatment of edges is quite good, with enough variety to describe the form in the lighting conditions (up to a point). There are always ways of treating the edges (i.e. face against dark hair space next to hair, light around the candle (2 very different 'kind' of edges), that can add subtlely and truth even in a somewhat 'rough', painterly treatment.

I feel it's a beautiful, expressive painting, with terrific impact, I'm sure even more so 'in the flesh'.

[Brian McDaniel]

I think I was a bit misunderstood - my own fault. After re-reading my post I understand why. I DO like the face and candle. What I was referring to was the somewhat blocky, subtle rendering of everything BUT the face & candle. That I liked, since it kept the viewers eyes going from the candle to the face.

So, I guess, I do like pretty much everything about this painting except the quality of the posted image.