A quick portrait painting of Reddit user littlemiddlemissy. I spent less time on this than most, and it shows — it’s definitely a bit rough. I’ve got a life drawing class starting Tuesday and wanted to clear the deck ahead of it. But I’m generally happy with it. Features are generally in the right place, which took some attempts to get right. My head is not yet equipped to see foreshortened forms properly. You’ll see that in the process video.
The reference image is black and white, which I decided to make into a color painting. It was a valuable experience. On the one hand, you can tell it’s less sophisticated than most of my paintings, but it pushed me on a couple skills I haven’t been exercising. Not only was I not able to sample colors from the reference, but also anything I picked would never look “right”. It’s all just guessing what might work.
In artistic color theory, they often break color space down into three axes: hue, saturation, and value. A grayscale image like the original reduces that down to just value, the lightness or darkness of any given point. There could be infinite ranges of hue and saturation that will reduce to the same value. The axes aren’t exactly orthogonal. Yellow hues produce different values than reds, for example.
But for the first time I was picking colors to try to match values. I guess that’s something that eventually comes naturally to an artist. I’m still a long way off from it. Short of that, it makes me lose confidence in how I break down the forms, which is how I end up with overall rougher shapes. I think she looks natural enough, though. For my first run at this, I’m pleased with the result.
