ted nuttall workshop/la crosse: day #3

not too much time to post this morning so this will be somewhat brief. ted went over the differences between corm and and cast shadows. the former having soft edges and the latter having hard edges. one must pay attention to these characteristics. doing so and rendering them accurately will pay big dividends on the painting.

in his demo he worked some more on the shadow side adding layers of paint in light washes. additionally he added the first of the neutral washes on the front of the bodice of her dress. there were also a few changes to the background most notably to the bottom right of the figure with the addition of a warmer glaze to a small patch below the whitish railing. a bit more work on the nose with the addition of some arbitrary color (hooker's green in this instance) around the side plane of the nose. i think that was about all and here is the photo of the progress to date.



i continued to tweak  my painting. i realized i made a classic mistake by trying to make up the folds on her shirt and really got them wrong. so i get a larger reference photo printed the night before and tried lifting and repainting some of them to make things seem a little more natural in terms of the drape of the fabric. i tried to add some color to the shadows and think i went a little too overboard in some places although ted seemed to like it. i had some problems with dividing up the background into isolated shapes, mainly in the bottom left. this happened by the yellowish streak that was literally the first thing that went down on the paper with the initial wash. i lifted that out.



the hair was troubling me but i think i worked out a solution. ted helped with some of the "anatomy" of errant strands that made them seem more believable.....thicker nearer the scalp and moving into a out of the light. i hanged a number of them and it seems to work better. some splashes of prussian blue above her head to help explain the top of her head and some of the lighter strands of hair that reside there finished out work for today.