Portrait Paintings Critique – Eric Bess

[ebess6]

Hello,

I have some work here that I would love to get critiqued so that I can continue to grow and learn as an artist. I appreciate any feedback!

[Joshua Jacobo]

These are amazing.

[Mengu Gungor]

Wow, these are fantastic! Your values are great, I like your compositions, features of the face look very accurate and are done very delicately and deliberately, expressions are great, I could keep going… I don’t have anything to fix per se, without knowing what goals you are setting out to achieve, and how close your work is to your vision. I’ll give you a few suggestions to experiment with.

Maybe spend a little more time on your drapery. The fabrics look like they don’t quite have the same attention you have shown the portraits. The man’s shirt seems to have all soft edges, and you could probably identify some hard edges, to differentiate the cast shadows of the fabric from the form shadows. Fabric behaves much like figure, folds have form shadows, core shadows, reflected light, and cast shadows, that you should be able to identify if you do a few studies. Also you can observe the sheen or translucency of fabrics and try to communicate that in your paintings. I’m sure you know all this, but bringing it up anyway, as I feel that’s an area you could strengthen.

Another thing you can explore is hue variations in your skin tones. You could add a little more red in the nose and ears, more yellow in the forehead, and experiment with mixing some blues, greens, or purples into the skin around the chin, or on the shadow side. You have great control of your values, so some hue variations while keeping the same value structure can bring greater richness to your work.

Your work is absolutely amazing, keep on painting.

[Chris_Legaspi]

Hi Eric, here is a video critique of one of your paintings

https://vimeo.com/416667322

[Author]

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