Pleine air portrait

Jeanine Jackson · 08-23-2002, 12:40 AM

Here is a 16" x 20" exercise from live model outdoors, then from photo for one studio session. I removed a column and replaced with flowers. The light on her left arm is contrived and it may take lots of guessing to get it to look more convincing. This is for my practice portfolio; should I take it further?

Jeanine Jackson · 08-23-2002, 12:47 AM

Photo for "Red Hat" by Jackson.

Steven Sweeney · 09-09-2002, 04:32 AM

Jeanine,

I think you had the cards stacked against you on this one, due to the absence of dramatic light effects in your source material. You wrote that you'd had to contrive some of the lighting, which is an awfully difficult thing to pull off. It's hard enough to accurately depict light effects you can see. It looks like you've pushed your dark values way down, perhaps to compensate for the fact that there's very little more light that can be wrung out of the set-up.

I think this has great potential with different lighting. I played around with the image in Photoshop and found that by bringing up the value of the flesh tones and reducing greatly the value of the background (trying a variety of hues), as if the woman had just stepped forward into the light from a noonday sun, she suddenly comes forward visually and has a presence there at the rail. I'd love to see the play of sunlight on that great red hat, as well as the temperature variations in the flesh tones as they move in and out of that light.

Right now your background isn't doing any work for you, it doesn't have any sense of mystery about it, little if any color, little variation in values -- within itself or in relation to the figure -- of the sort of deliberate design that would contribute to the overall idea of the piece. I'm looking for a sense of space behind the woman that I'm not seeing.

I think her left hand could use a little revision. The wrist is almost wider than the span of knuckles, when in fact it should be (and the photo shows this) considerably narrower. Also the knuckles of the middle and ring finger seem to have disappeared, creating the impression that those two fingers are very short in relation to the others. Dig out and restate those shadow shapes around the knuckles; they're very descriptive of the anatomical form.

Cheers,
Steven

Timothy C. Tyler · 09-09-2002, 08:43 AM

I just taught a class where we painted outside a lot. The students got some very nice things. The bad thing was we also had a nice studio and these were driven students. So, they would go in at night and "fix" their plein aire stuff under weak bulbs w/o reference. The lovely exciting effects they had literally sweated for were lost.

I would suggest when you get information save it. You may then work from (a photo say) but keep the knowledge gained outside. The soft effect of the indirect light on you model looks like it's inside near a good window...which is great, it just doesn't read as outside.

Jeanine Jackson · 09-09-2002, 09:21 AM

Thank you Steven and Timothy!

I think this subject deserves more effort on my part keeping in mind your clever comments.

I shall post progress soon.

Mike McCarty · 09-09-2002, 01:24 PM

Jeanine,

Consider the girl's right arm. You have taken away the vertical pillar, but I think you painted the arm as if the pillar was still influencing the shape of the arm. Imagine the arm a little rounder on the outside?

Jeanine Jackson · 09-09-2002, 04:23 PM

Thank you, Mike. You are, of course, correct!

Here is the latest.