Garden portrait

[Cindy Procious]

Thank you all for your nice comments on my picture. I struggled over this background for quite a while - when I took the photos the black-eyed susans were all dead, so I had to cobble together references. The difficulty then became making it all into a cohesive whole. It gave me many sleepless nights.

Anyway - here's a couple of details of their faces.

[Cindy Procious]

The other one...

[Julie Deane]

Thanks so much for posting these closeups, Cindy. Very nice! I especially love how that light falls on their hair.

[Chris Saper]

Very well handled, Cindy! It is so very difficult to paint natural looking smiles, especially with teeth - very, very nice!

[Cindy Procious]

Thanks very much, Chris and Julie.

I'll be restretching this week - I'll report back how it goes in case anyone is interested.

[Cindy Procious]

Update on restretching -

All the horrible things I feared (cracking paint, canvas tearing, spontaneous combustion) did not come to pass. It was a piece of cake.

I wound up taking off an inch from the top, in order to better place them in the picture plane - so in the end, I'm glad I did have to tackle this project.

[Terri Ficenec]

Hi Cindy -- don't know how I missed this... it's beautifully done! I especially appreciate how delicately you've handled the skin -- and those freckles!

Glad to hear that the re-stretching went well.

[Marina Dieul]

I'm glad your work didn't burn spontaneously, it's a nice portrait, with a very good sens of light...