i worked a little on the painting of our grand daughter nalah yesterday morning. there were some niggling little things that were bothering me about it. i had these doubts in the jozwiak/nelson workshop and put this little painting up for a critique. i got some good feed back and decided to act on it.
the first thing was that her face is just too warm. this i knew going in as i hadn't cooled it off with dilute (really dilute!) glazes of ultramarine blue as i often will with caucasian skin. so i added a couple glazes and i am happy with the color temperature now. this trick of glazing with the ultramarine blue rarely changes the value much but really does cool down the area and, if in the right place, makes it recede.
the second thing was that that her jacket was a bit drab and the manganese blue in the upper background looked a bit lonely. i thought i could remedy both of those with some addition of manganese blue to her jacket. done!
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| "a handful of posey" (11"X11") |
i thought the dandelions needed a little more color so i put some streaks of cadmium yellow medium over the upper flowers. with the large dark area below the flowers being separated by a more definite transition than i wanted, that area competed with the face more than i desired. first i tried losing some of the inferior edges.....not quite there. then i decided that i could make the whole thing smaller. so i cropped much of it off. so, now the painting is about square, which i find interesting and makes it unusual, and i like it much better.
leave a comment if you like....good or bad.
Adorable! I think the addition of more blue in her jacket works really well and I really like the cropping. Very good work!
ReplyDeletethanks,dena. its always nice to get some validation from another artist when you do something you aren't too sure about.
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