Portrait of young woman

[garyartista]

This is an acrylic portrait of a 15 year old.  I like the dramatic lighting.  Are the transitions too harsh?  She does look older than her age but I do not want to over do it? Notice any ways to improve the drawing?    The left arm is made up.  In the photo it’s cut off.  How does it look?  Anything else?

 

 

[garyartista]

[erikdennes]

Here are a few ideas.  To make the face more of a focal point, I brought down the value of the rest of the skin so the face has the lightest values and the most contrast.  The right contour of her body needs to be adjusted to show the scapula and the curve of her ribcage.  The dress line needs to be concave and not convex to show it wraps around the cylinder of her torso.  I also put some lights to indicate the reflected light at the top of her dress.  I put some darker values in her hand to make it go behind the left arm it sits on.  I also put some highlights on the fingers to make it a secondary focal point.  I put darker values in the shadow side of her arm to separate the arm from the torso more, and I put a little more modeling in the torso.  Her jaw line, the way you have it goes too far back, so I changed the jaw line, and brought the hair forward a little bit.  I also extended the hair a little on both sides to better capture the gesture of the hair and separate it from the background a little better.  I lightened the background at the bottom so there is a clear separation between the front of her body and the background.  I put some darks around the eye sockets to describe them a little better and changed the shape of her left eye socket to fit into the perspective better. Hope you can see all of this in the included image, and I hope this helps you with your work.

[PetrStranik]

Hi there Garyartista. The first thing that I noticed when I saw your reference – soft light (hard to render, subtle value changes – I think It would be great to try to do a portrait drawing from it in a style of Fechin. As your acrylic painting goes I would suggest to make transitions softer and try to turn form with temperature changes. For example her forehead feels just like one forwardly placing plane which is not the case. If you look closely her forehead turns to the left by changing it’s value (ever so slightly) darker and little bit more cooler. I guess Acrylic does not lend itself to soft light handling since it dries almost instantly. I would want to have it wet as long as possible so I can adjust edges easily so I would choose Oils over acrylic.. (I would crosscheck with Jeremy Lipking work)

I think you also forgot to put darkest accents – e.g under her chin and alongside the forehead where it meeds the hair. Hair are also more brownish not so golden which would put more believability to the work.

Regards

Petr

[Author]

Posts