[Chris Saper]

Dear Barbara,

Your underpainting actually looks like it is approaching the finish stage, so I am not sure how helpful it would be for me to make suggestions, but perhaps they will be useful in future portraits. Although your question is specific to the medals, I would address a few preliminary elements first, which include composition and drawing.

Just thinking out loud on the compositional aspects of your painting, I think you have a very lovely, well-done resource photo; I like the position of the hand in the photo. By moving it to rest on the chair, you've created not only a little eye-trap with the back of the chair, but have a light value against a strong dark triangle that moves the eye out of the picture at the bottom. The globe's position, combined with its value and strong color saturation, competes very strongly, and threatens to overpower the man's head. By perhaps choosing instead to position the globe behind the figure on a table of some sort, your shapes would be connected, and the forms overlap, so that the globe could more readily become subordinate to the figure. (This is the reason I always try to work out compositional issues before I make other decisions - including dimensions of the canvas - before I start. I thinkit's really important to work out the negative spaces before beginning. There's quite a bit on the Forum with regard to massing values in a three-value study.)

I think you should also check your drawing, as the man's head is too small for the body that you have painted. His stance in the photo is both commanding and inviting, which is not only unusal but very attractive, and conveys, at least to me, a strong feeling about the persona. You will also want to check the proportions of the head. Even though the photo's viewpoint is a tiny bit below eye level, it's not enough so to shorten the forehead to the extent you have. I usually find the placement of the ears to be a quick giveaway to the attitude of the head; in the photo, your subject's lower ear lobe sits just about horizontally with the line where upper and lower lips meet.

Looking at your photo, I think it is wonderful how the light shoulder actually does fall against the darker ground, and the reverse happens with the shoulder in shadow. I think this is so often an invented convention for painters, that when it really occurs, it lends a very strong sense ot the quality of the light on the form.

As to the medals, I would probably just ask him; he may feel they are very important to the portrait. You can paint them accurately, yet without the level of detail or contrast that will cause them to be eye-poppers.

Good luck!