[Chris Saper]

Dear Brian,

Thank you for the chance to review your harpist. I will try to respond to your specific questions.

Composition.
I feel that it is nearly impossible to avoid a harp dominating any compostion when it is shown in the position in which it is played. It is such an enormous instrument, and always dwarfs its player with its solid diagonal taper.That said, you can minimize its strength by using very desaturated colors and soft and lost edges in the harp itself. Its powerful visual postition can be further controlled by avoiding areas of high contrast with the instrument, particularly where it is farther away from your center of interest. With regard to the strings, I think that the perspective would result in the spaces between the strings narrowing as they approach the head. When they are uniformily vertical, they read almost as a screen. It might be possible to avoid painting strings at all, just indicating them in a few areas with single strands of light.

With regard to the lower left corner of your painting, the harp forms a little tangent point in the corner, and acts like an arrow taking the eye to the corner and out of the painting, so that is something to look for when you are placing the initial composition.

Skin Tones.
I think you have been very successful in your glazing to get smooth color and light-shadow transitions. Your light source appears to be warm in temperature; if this is the case, then you would want the shadows to be relatively cooler in temperature. On my monitor, it looks like you have placed some yellow-greens in the shadowed areas of skin, but I think you could go further in cooling the shadow (generally speaking, the same temperatue shift would apply to the harp, dress, and hair)

Because photos will "clump" dark values together, it is not possible to see whether the shadow cores are too dark...they appear to be a little dark compared to the value of the reflected light, but that may be an artifact of posting the photo. Conversely as you look at your original, the reflected light in the shadows may be a little too light.

Hair.
You have shown a nice soft hairline, which works very effectively.The hair next to the harp would be in shadow, while the hair on our right would catch highlights that would be relatively cooler in nature than the overall local color of the hair.

Background.
The value of your background looks very nice next to the skin and hair. Using the background color in the turning-away planes of the subject is a good way to integrate color.If you cool off the shadowed skin, you may want to also cool the colors in the background. You might consider extending the light area of background to the top of the painting, since the harp, head and hair are all on a somewhat horizontal line.

I am sure your friend will be thrilled with this painting as it has a very peaceful and serene feel to it, as well as a graceful pose.

Best wishes to you, Chris