[erikdennes]

I think you did great from the waist up!.  One of the most important parts of the pose is her right leg, because that is where most of the weight of the body is.  Without that, the figure isn’t grounded and doesn’t look natural.  Also, I find the mark making on the right side of the body distracts from the figure too much.  Make sure your hatching marks follow the form.  It is pretty good on the arm, but cuts the form off on the leg.  Keep up the good work!  Hope this helps.

[erikdennes]

[erikdennes]

[erikdennes]

This video along with some of Steve Huston’s painting videos have really helped me understand what to look for in terms of color temperature and color relationships in portraiture.  1000 Thumbs up.

An exercise that I did that really helped me was to work digitally from a photograph just painting on top of the image.  That way I could focus only on the effect of color temperature on the image and not have to worry about all of the other painting problems: mixing, placement, edges, shape, etc.  I de-saturated my source image, and posterized it into 4 value zones.  Then I used the paint bucket tool to give a flat color to each of my zones, keeping the value the same.  From there, I could use a paint brush to manipulate color temperature and saturation within each of the zones, keeping the value the same, and seeing what effect that had on the image.

After doing this, I painted the portrait using traditional paints and it was much easier to focus on the color relationships and color temperatures because I had already done that digitally, and knew exactly what I wanted to put down.   I suppose that is what a small thumbnail is for, but the above exercise allowed me to experiment a lot and see the effect immediately, which really solidified the concepts in my mind.

VERY helpful.

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