I'm flattered and grateful that so many people took the time to really look at this painting and give helpful suggestions.
Jim, believe me, if I thought the Forum were a competition I wouldn't be posting at all. I'm not apologizing for my work, only for my cowardly reluctance to be publicly scrutinized by other articulate artists. Besides, I want my paintings to look unmistakably "my own" - only better than "my own". There seems to be some things about my style that I can't change no matter how hard I try; I think this is true for every artist.
I learned a lot from these posts, the most important being that you can't make up a dark background when you take a photo of a subject against a light background. (Which is what I did here.) The edges are too difficult to fudge. Not to sound defensive here, but I can remember just one or two other portraits I've done that have had a dark value background, so I'm low on that learning curve.
The second thing is that you can't fake a Classical Realism style without having the absolutely correct lighting conditions - high or direct side, single primary light source (only that one source if you're working live; some sort of fill setup if you're taking photos). This boy was lit by a huge floor to ceiling window, located just to the left of the viewer's shoulder, nearly full-face to him, with lots of ambient room light. There was no drop off from top to bottom, only from left to right.
My next two commissions are outdoor portraits, but when I get the chance I'm going to take my time and really get the lighting right for an indoor portrait. I'll bet the thing will paint itself. (Well, maybe.)
Third, if I knew how to use my Photoshop, I wouldn't have had to do things such as: put in a pink shirt; scrape out a pink shirt; put in an ochre blazer; scrape out an ocher blazer; etc.
I'm going to work some more on this. Thanks to all of you for posting, this definitely was more helpful to me than Dreaded Silence.
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Threaded Mode
