Portrait For Critique

[Renee Brown]

Here is one of the portraits I did for my upcomings portrait shows. It is a painting of my grandson while he slept (which wasn't for a long time!)

Renee Brown

Lovely light on the bed, wonderful colours. Lovely portrait of your grandson. One to be treasured!

[Karin Wells]

Your skin tones look very "orangey" on my monitor...If what I am seeing is accurate, I think that this probably does a disservice to the delicate and pale skin tones of a caucasian baby. I generally like to lighten and cool these skin tones. Below is a detail of what I am talking about.....

[Renee Brown]

Karin, Thank you.

That is so much more my digital camera's problem. The skin is much lighter and more cohesive in person. I used glazes to achieve that unity.

I just purchased a new higher megapixel camera and I am hoping the images will be more true to life in the future. I should have mentioned this when I posted. Thank you.

Renee

This reddish (of the three color channels, red green and blue) color cast of your photo has nothing to do with the camera's resolution. It's a function of the camera's metering for this photo. When a camera takes a picture, it first makes judgements about the image it's about to capture. For example, with values, it finds the darkest value in the scene at which it's pointed and records it as absolute black. It finds the lightest and records it as absolute white. All the other values of the image are averaged out between these two extremes.

A similar thing happens with color, only much worse. This is why photographs are seldom of much use to a portrait artist as color references. This problem with photographs of finished paintings can be remedied by varying your photographing technique, and/or possibly by tweaking your photograph with an image editing application such as photoshop (I use MS image composer, which comes with Front Page).

All digital cameras that I've seen, no matter how "automatic" offer some control of the metering, from "EV" settings to actual manual control of "shutter" speed and "aperture" opening. I've put these words in quotes because they actally refer to the operation of film cameras whereas digitals work differently, although this little tidbit is not important here! Any way, try playing around with these settings.

More importantly, try playing around with the lighting. Obviously, the inherent color/temperature of your lighting (e.g. flourescent vs.incandescent vs. full spectrum...) has an effect on the resulting photograph. Less obvious is the effect that the intensity and angle of your lighting has on the photograph. The way the camera meters the image is largely dependant upon the lighting. for example, in relatively dim lighting, there is a greater chance of color distortion. Whereas a film camera would respond to dim lighting by increasing the size of the aperture opening (the hole which allows light onto the film), a digital camera amplifies the signal, which is similar to distortion on speakers when you turn up a radio too loudly. I could go on with such trivia, but the point is PLAY WITH YOUR LIGHTING. I usually take many photos with different lighting and camera settings until I get a satisfactory photo which represents a painting's colors accurately.

To reduce glare when photographing paintings or any 2D piece, the piece should be "cross lit". This means that you should do ANYTHING BUT have your light source coming from the same direction as that from which you're photographing. This is one of the reasons why flash photography in general is so terrible. Lights should be placed pointing at the piece from the sides, so they're not reflecting back into the camera any more than neccessary.

Regarding resolution of digital cameras: Last I've checked, the lowest resolution available on hand-held digital cameras is 640x480. Despite the fact that a major marketing point is made of a camera's resolution, chances R that even this size is larger than any image U'd want to have on a web site (keeping file-size in mind). However, U're printing much, particularly large prints, resolution becomes a factor relevent to your image quality.

Not that I'm a big fan of orange babies, but I like the somewhat impressionistic use of color in your paintings overall. This is one of the things that differentiates paintings from photographs!

Hope this endless babble helps.

[Cynthia Daniel]

I've taken the libery of posting the version of Renee's portrait from her web pages. The skin tones are softer here than in her original image above in this thread.

As a general note, I've noticed when I scan, darks tend to go darker and lights tend to go lighter with very light areas often looking almost totally washed out. I do selective adjustments, where needed before posting a portrait on a web site for this reason. But, I've been scanning and adjusting portraits for 6 years and this isn't something everyone is going to be able to do.

[Renee Brown]

Cynthia, Karin and Jim,

Your words are not falling on deaf ears. I am in my 'rethinking', 'mulling it over' and 'deciding' stages as to how I can apply your excellent advice to my work.

Above in Cynthia's post is the painting photographed in daylight (indirect sun). A little glare-back from being outside. I have the Smith-Vector lighting system Jim. I use the 500 watt photobulbs at a 90 degree angle so the light falls sideways across the painting. I only need to use one lamp since the light is so strong. I bought 250 watt bulbs to light my clients (one lamp) with a 40" umbrella for fill. Do you all use boom lights or rim lights behind the client? What else do I need to buy? I know one thing- the background in a bag from Photek. Is the 6' x 7' big enough for most sittings?

I find my HP200c (not an expensive camera) seems to pick up every color even underneath the final glazes. (Probably a good thing in most cases, right? Just not here as the cad. orange is shining through.) I am hoping the new Sony cybershot50 I just bought will do a better job.

Karin, I had printed out your learning page and I notice that you have cadmium orange on your palette. I have been using cad. orange with thalo green light, yellow ochre and titanium white to make the lights on this baby (my sweet grandson). For the shadows I used chromium oxide green, cad. red dark and a touch of alizarin crimson with tit. white to soften.

Karin, How did you get those soft ochre looking tones on your beautiful portrait? You probably are not using the cad. orange, right? It's a very strong color and I should probably reserve it for turning the planes.

Cynthia, I see you brought over my photo. Thanks. I always have trouble getting the pixels right on the tinyheads. However, I am out of my experimenting stage and am back to my usual blond again. Thanks to all for the good advice.

Renee

[Karin Wells]

I only use cad orange in the deepest shadows. For the halftone....where the plane turns away from the light, I use cool paint (almost blue).

It is the overlaping of warm and cool paint from the highlights down into the deepest shadows that allows one to get those soft skin tones.

The following URL has a section that explains this in (I hope) more understandable detail.

http://kcwells.com/technical2.htm

[John de la Vega]

Renee, I'd love to see your portrait show. Nice feeling, lovely light. Skin tones are light-dependent, as everything else, it can be misleading to think in terms of 'Caucasian baby skin tones' (sorry, Karin), particularly if this takes you away from seeing and painting in terms of light on the skin / form. Speaking of light on form, here's where I have some problems. Some of the areas, particularly above the eyes, read (in this scan) too bluish or greyish. Maybe it's your technique, lovely, painterly, but I bit on the 'wooly' (I don't want to call it 'splotchy', 'cause it's not) side. There's also an area on the jawline (exposed to the light) which doesn't read quite as 'baby form'.

I do want to see your portrait show. Let me know where it's gonna be!

[Karin Wells]

Hmmmm....I'm not sure that I understand your comment John and I'm not really sure that we disagree. Of course light and shadow play on all shades of skin tone for sure. I have seen your work and you certainly get it right.

In general (and I do mean general), I paint people of color the same way as people with lighter skin tones. The difference is that the value is darker (according to the sitter) and darker shades, can take more warmth (I use yellow ochre) into the mixture.

Basically what I am trying to say is that the pale skin tones (i.e., the "caucasian baby" reference) can not handle a lot of hot colored paint. When a skin tone begins to look "orangey" (either in light or shadow) the artist needs to cool it down.

"Orangey" skin tones are such a common mistake...