Portrait Paintings (Feedback Welcomed!)
Spent quite some hours watercoloring over the weekend.
I took my time with this one, but I guess the size of the portraits are still kinda miniature-ish. Might look into increasing portrait size but I'm wondering if that really is the issue.
BELOW ARE SOME PERSONAL THOUGHTS:
//FIRST SLIDE:
//GOING LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM
First attempt: Didn't really look at the reference that clearly so once I got a rough guideline, just went for it. I learnt to actually NOT use so much black paint, as it ended up being the most eye-catching area. Even for eyebrows, go gradually darker. Only after finishing it I realized well, the girl in the reference is more orange than yellow. Also without much contrast in the facial planes, the subject now looks like a baby.
Second attempt: Tried to preserve the whites but ended up letting it dictate the piece. Nothing wrong with keeping whites, but gives the waterline too much prominence. Being afraid to add more halftones and commit made the facial structure kinda different. But I genuinely thought structurely, everything read pretty well! Instead of saving highlights, I lifted the wet areas with a tissue paper to create the highlighted area.
Third Attempt: I realize when your ceiling light is yellow, and the paper white is now yellow, you get a little colorblind and it looks normal, but when you swap the lights back to white you see how much yellow it actually gives you. My brush control slipped and it ended up giving a lopsided face in the end.
Fourth Attempt: At this point, I lost quite a lot of steam and redid the pencil sketch many a times. But took my time and did the mid tones first, and then really tried to slowly paint edges so that it wouldn't go over the face like in the third attempt. Also, instead of putting pure black for the shadow of the eye corners, I used brown as well. I spent more time studying the eye shapes in this attempt. Also the deepest shadows of the jacket had black paint to match the reference better instead of just pure blue in the third attempt.
//SECOND SLIDE:
Mechanical pencil on the second slide for scale haha.
//LAST SLIDE:
Last slide has the actual reference image!
//THOUGHTS:
It's hard to achieve that likeness. Sometimes I look at something and can't decide if it's yellow, or orange more. But slowly taking my time, and taking a slightly looser approach helps!