I've Just Seen a Face

This is my second attempt to "do one thing, then move on," although to be honest, it sort of digressed from that purpose into "getting an entire face done colourfully" - which is a legitimate goal in itself. It's just good to try to do ONE thing when painting, instead of change your mind halfway through. That said, I'm not at all displeased with the result:

The best thing about this painting, in my opinion, is the colorfulness of it: I tend to use Earth colours and wind up with muddy, slightly monochrome paintings. In this one, I ratcheted up the chroma and got a slightly more colourful result than usual.

The worst thing about this painting, at least in terms of the actual painting process, was that I started out wayyyy too light in the darks, without realizing it, and had to totally go through the shadow section and reinforce the entire area. That sucked, since I was well on my way into the portrait before I realized that my shadows were too weak to support the lights. It also made the face look as though it were pivoting around the nose and kind of folding in onto itself. (It still has that effect, slightly.) I needed to bulk up the area slightly below and to the right of the nose. Oh yeah: some of the reflected light in that are was ridiculously too light (a leftover of my ridiculously too light shadows), which, come to think of it, the "pillar of the mouth" on the lower-right-side of the lips still seems a little too bright. (I just learned "pillar of the mouth" in the Eliot Goldfinger book; if you paint the figure and don't have that book, drop what you are doing and run like hell to Amazon.com and order it right now!) I'm planning on being buried with my copy when I die, so, sorry.

This painting, it turned out, was the last of the portraits I did before the Alla Prima Portrait Painting workshop at Studio Escalier. I had potentially the most stressful three weeks of my life just before leaving: a HUGE project at work was just ending (the original due date came and went, and we agreed on a deadline a week later, which seemed more to prolong the pain instead of actually assuage it), a huge freelance project loomed (I wanted to finish before leaving for France; I didn't, exactly), the "Arts & Crafts Room Nazi" in my condo unit more or less outlawed oil painting in the communal art room, and I was summoned before the condo Board to explain my reaction to that pronouncement (let's not get into that), I basically decided to move out of the condo unit in response.

So, far from getting dozens of paintings accomplished, as I'd somehow naively thought I could, I got more like half a dozen done.