[Joan Breckwoldt]

I would be so grateful for help with my glazing problem. I completed an underpainting in raw umber and titanium white. It is a painting of a little girl. I am very happy with the underpainting and have resolved all the shadows, etc., with the underpainting.

I then put two thin glazes of burnt umber over this. But my next step to paint on the scumble of flesh tone isn't working! The problem seems to be that half of this girl's face is darker because it's in shadow. Not too dark, but a little darker, like the shadow on the side of a nose. The scumble looks fine when I put it on the lighter side of the face, but the scumble looks almost WHITE when I paint it over the shadow side. And if I use a very thin glaze (not much paint and lots of Liquin) then I can't even see any difference at all. I am using zinc white in my scumble so it'll be transparent.

I made my flesh color out of different mixtures of all or some of the following: raw umber, zinc white, raw sienna and burnt umber. The problem isn't the flesh tone, I don't think.

With two thin glazes of burnt umber, her face looks a little 'brown'. I might have put on too much? But with only one thin glaze, she hardly had any color. I kept wiping the 'scumbles' off of that because there wasn't enough color in the underpainting and I felt like the color under the scumbled flesh color should be a little closer to the flesh color (in tone at least).

I've done this before and didn't have any problem with scumbling over shadows so I'm stumped. I will try and post a photo this evening or tomorrow as soon as I figure out how to load the program that manipulates the photos. I realize it's hard to help when there is no photo, but perhaps someone can offer me an idea to try tomorrow! This is my first commission and it's due mid December. Yikes!

Joan