What to call it? Purple Shirt?

[Julie Deane]

I have a hard time with titles (suggestions welcome), but here is a recent oil, started from life and finished from photos. 16 x 20.

[Julie Deane]

closeups

[Tammy Moore]

What really catches my attention is her wonderfully attentive expression. I get such a strong impression that there is someone there in the room that is talking and she is so enjoying the listening end of it.

That impression doesn't mean that I have instantly hit upon a good title that goes with it however. But maybe my mentioning the observation might spark someone to the perfect one.

Just a few suggestions in that vein to perhaps get someone's creative juices flowing:
An Audience of One
Conversation
The Listener
Pleasant Company
Eavesdropping

[Marcus Lim]

Hi Julie, that's a camisole in fact.
You can try using a thesaurus to find words that associate with "purple"...for instance, this girl's portrait strikes me with a title "Lavender Beauty". Hope this helps.

[Mike McCarty]

Julie,

This looks really nice and soft. Maybe just a few things could be tweaked a bit.

Her nose seems to be shadowed a bit much on our right - the lit side. It looks like it should be catching more light. I think if you lighten it up the nose won't look as heavily modeled. Also, the shadowed side under her lip seems to be going a little too dark. As you look to adjust that value you might see that the shape of the lower lip could be adjusted. Also, the shadowed side of her cheek and jaw seem to have been trimmed a bit much and might go a bit fuller. See if you can't find some kind of darker value to place in the inside corner of her left eye to define it a little more. Hard to tell for sure without looking at the copy but I'll offer these few things for you to double check.

[Julie Deane]

Tammy, thanks for the title suggestions. She was watching a movie on tv, and was so attentive that I had to tone it down some.

Marcus, thanks so much! I knew that type of top had a specific name, but I couldn't come up with it.

Mike, thanks for your observations. I will go back and work on some fixes. I didn't post the original photo because I was not striving to get a likeness. The objective for this piece was to explore values, edges, color and feeling. But your suggestions are dead on: I inadvertantly trimmed the face, let the local color of the nose influence the values, and overdid/underdid other values.