Portrait with Acrylics (c&c)

[detonum]

Hello. I started painting a few months ago, with acrylics. Ive been enjoying them, their real nice though they dry real quick :p Ive been trying to concentrate on the human skin tones..

This is quite of a quick portrait, it was done in a few hours (from a photo). I dont have alot of colors yet, their costy in here Finland, and they only sell the priciest winsor newton Galeria..So I only have main colors and burnt umber:)

This is a bad photo of it..(damn scanner not working). I hope you can see something.

http://www.planetsideimages.com/uploads/portraitpainting.jpg

I'll propably post more paintings in here soon..

[(c)]

looks good so far but ad some more details
and i think the nose is a bit too big

[Rohan]

Nice attempt, but I can think of a few things that might make things easier for you. Get yourself some acrylic retarder and/or flow control if you want to keep the paints wet longer, flow control is good for smoothing brushwork and getting your tones to blend into one another. Desaturating your colours a little by adding greys or adding some of the complementary, and remember when it comes to chroma or colour intensity, less is more(generally). Fredflickstone's tutorials will help a lot if you havent done much experimentation with colour, but I recommend experimenting with mixing the colours you have, to get to know how they react with one another. Also it might be beneficial for your tonal control if you cover all that white surface on your paper with a diluted grey or some burnt umber underpainting when you start out(this is a personal choice), rather than the vignette thing you got goin on. The key highlights in your image will stand out much better if you do this, otherwise the contrast of those edges against all that white are competing for the eye's attention,. hope this helps
keep it up
Ro