First Post Here (Oil Painting)

[MarkHarchar]

Hello all,
I am going to preface this thread by saying that I probably don't deserve to even post in this section at this stage of my game. However, this is the first piece that I feel is really finished and isn't a piece of crap. This is a portrait of my niece done in oils (water soluble ones...I know, toy paints, worthless medium...) that was done as a final for a painting class. It is of my niece and it was chosen to attempt to portray her indifferent 10 year old female attitude. Here is the whole progression. :)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v335/hylandr2/Jenny.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v335/hylandr2/jennysketch.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v335/hylandr2/jennyunderpaint.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v335/hylandr2/Jenny_oil.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v335/hylandr2/jenny_oil_detail.jpg

[Gilead]

Well your paintings have taken a huge jump since you first started your daily painting thread and that wasn't too long ago so I think it's great with that in mind.
You lost a bit of shadow on the edge of the headband so that shape seems flat.
There should be some bluish shading in the curve of the eyeballs and the upper lids would cast a shadow onto them.
Remember you're not trying to replicate a photograph so if the camera robs you of some shadows you need to get them back.
The empty space to the left of her has nice color, but it's not doing anything. It either needs to be cropped in a little closer or filled with something else; her dog, teddy bear or pet unicorn.
The drawing's real solid too. A big improvement over stuff from your sketchbook.
My art teacher told me about pthalo blue underpaintings, but I've never tried it. This looks cool by itself.
Nice work.

[DavePalumbo]

haha, I saw the ref come up and thought "damn, now that's photo-realism! He even put in the date!"

The very first thing that pops into my head so far as suggestions is try and work from better reference in the future. Avoid head-on flash snapshots, they flatten the form of pretty much everything. You're really making things tough on yourself with that flash. Try the next one with some directional light, direct sunlight being an excellent place to start. But that's just my 2 cents. I personally avoid head-on flash like the plague

[MarkHarchar]

Gilead,
You are correct, I did seem to lose a bit of shadow on the head band. I did try to add the shading to the eyeballs and actually used a combination of ultramarine blue and cad read light to get a greyed bluish color, however, especially in this photo of the painting, I didn't push it far enough. I agree about the space to the left, however, the teacher wanted her eyes to be in that golden mean quadrant and wanted some space for the figure to be able to "move". I said, well...ok.

Dave,
"Grainy camera style" will be MO..LOL
I totally agree about the flash shots. If I had my choice, I would have had here pose with the right lighting, but I already had this picture of a "candid" shot. What I would do next time (like we saw DDS at AOL) would be to use the ref for the pose but get another for the lighting.

Again, I'm still learning, but feel I'm making some progress...
Thanks guys for the look!

[fukifino]

Hey Mark. Other than what's already been mentioned, I see two things that crept into the final painting that really tend to throw the facial proportions off. The first is the exaggeration of the compression of her cheek...if you look in the photo ref and your initial drawing and your underpainting, it's all very subtle, but at some point before the final, you really exaggerated that outward bulge more than it should have been. The second area is her chin...a lot of the chin near her shoulder is lost to shadow in the ref shot, but in your final painting is appears as if that area just isn't there at all. These two factors combine to really throw the symmetry of the face off. You picked a tough shot to tackle, no doubt, so those little subtleties really exaggerate any mistakes.

Oh, one other thing I noticed was the eyes...you seem to have lost a lot of the shape and angles of the eyes from drawing to final, which also ended up exposing more of the iris itself than in the initial shots. You lost the sort of squareness of the inner(nose) side of the right eye, and lost that lid coming down over the outside of the left eye.

Nice to see you still at it though!!