Girl with Horse
 

CW with horse, offered for critique - o/c 30X24. Some blotches and glare due to photo, some due to me in general. It

It's a tough photo to work from since the exposure for her face is off. The shot is perfectly exposed for the horse and I imagine that's one reason why it was easier to paint. This is a great example of why it's best to get several bracketed exposures to paint from. This exposure gave you skin tones that are much too light and too magenta and so you've had to invent which is very, very difficult to do.

There are also some issues with the roundness of the form of the head and with her expression. Since you aren't planning to do any more work on this painting I won't go into detail here, but she looks much happier in the photo than in the painting. Also, the photo shows a much greater range of light to dark from one side of the head to the other whereas the painting makes it much flatter and has lost the three-dimensionality of the form.

Michelle,

Thank you so much for your time in critiquing this painting. Your description of the problem areas made me think that you had been there looking over my shoulder watching me invent the skin tones, bouncing back and forth painting and repaiting the light and shadow sides, never getting it quite right, after somewhat breezing through the horse. I wish you had been there to say "wait, paint from a photo where you controlled the lighting of the subject". I'm learning.

My camera has a "spot metering" feature, where I could focus on the face and meter the shot exactly on that small area of the image. I chose my camera specifically because it had this feature.

Check and see if your camera has this capability and how to use it. It will give you perfectly exposed faces every time.

Then you can turn spot metering off and shoot the image again to get an average exposure for all the rest of the stuff in the photo.

And, assuming you have a digital camera, you can always check what your photos look like before you leave the photo shoot. I give the subect a few minutes to rest while I take some time to look and see that I have several properly exposed face shots to choose from before I tell the subject we're done.