Kim

[John Zeissig]

Hello all,

This painting of Kim is my first serious effort at portrait painting. I'd painted "portraits" before as exercises, but not with the amount of planning and effort that went into this one. It is 13" x 10", oil on maple panel. I spent two months doing very quick sketches from life, a dozen or so memory drawings, two watercolors, and some photo studies before I started the actual oil painting. In the actual painting phase I had discovered Jonathan Janson's "How to paint your own Vermeer" website and followed his technique.

http://howtopaintavermeer.fws1.com/

He was very helpful to me with advice and encouragement and critical comments when the raw umber underpainting was done. Of course the only thing Vermeerish about it is the directional light and the interior setting. The colors in the jpeg are not too bad, except that her skin tone here is discernably more reddish than the actual painting, at least before posting. I've got a later painting of Kim that I'll post for critique eventually.

Since I'm so new at this I'd like to post my entire "portfolio" in chronological order to get some sense of whether I might be drifting off in a bad direction. Well, I've already gotten out of order with the self-portrait that was my first post, but the fourth portrait that I've done (of five total since January). I'll try to do this at appropriate intervals. If it gets to be too much someone say something and I'll back off. I'm fairly thick-skinned, so don't be afraid to let me have it.

[Mark Branscum]

Hello,

I like your painting. It was well thought out, I can tell and I love the background.

However, if I may, the one thing that was bothering me was the right eye (her left eye).

I might be wrong and your reference actually shows it this way. But, if not, then I recommend ligtening it up a bit, as it seems off to me.

Other than that I am loving it.

Mark

[John Zeissig]

Hi Mark,

Yes, her left eye is off by a country mile and it's because the jpeg is displaying differently than it did before I posted it. The whole area around the lighted side of her face is washed out in terms of both color and contrast. In particular, the white of that eye is too high in value and the shadow under the eyelid is vague. There is a faint dark margin to the iris in the painting that is entirely missing in the view on my monitor. The net effect is to make that eye appear to be looking too far to her right. I'll try to correct it, or post a detail. There is no unitary reference for this painting, so you'll have to take my word for it for now that the likeness is good.

Whew, I'm glad to hear that you like the background, because I've had reason to worry that I may be in trouble on my backgrounds. Thanks for the input. I've been meaning to offer comments on your painting and others as well, but my typing is deadly slow and I'm having a hard time keeping up.

[Denise Racine]

Hello John!

Don't worry, this background is great! I love the texture on the wall. The door handle looks very real. And, the face looks very good.

Just a little suggestion... I think your model would probably look better situated a bit higher towards the top of the canvas. In both Margaret Carter Baumgaertner and Tom Browning's workshops the models are usually 2-3 inches from the top. I have tried lower and higher and tend to agree with them. I hope you don't mind but I cropped your painting to show you what I mean.

Also, It might be the digital image but her hair color seems very close to the skin color creating that surrealistic effect again!

[John Zeissig]

Hi Denise,

I've been stuck in a little corner of limbo (or is it the other place?) all week, due to my part-time day job turning into full-time temporarily. Thanks for doing the digital crop. I've been given the same advice about the relation of the top of the head to the top of the canvas by others. I guess it's one of those dogmas that everyone adheres to in the portrait trade. I can't say that it matters to me one way or the other, although this may change with experience.

I'm intrigued by the surrealism reference. In this post the flesh tones do appear more red than in the actual painting, and consequently are similar to the shadows in the hair. In the self-portrait there was a definite reddish quality to the flesh tones, but I saw that as absolutely required by the sunset background. When I think of surrealism I think of limp watches, biomorphs in landscapes, and other distortions of forms, etc. I'm not sure what you mean, unless there is some relationship between surrealism and monochromaticity or homogeneity of color. Or is it that the color seems unnatural, hence surreal? I'm going to post a better version of Kim to try to get the jpeg closer to the real thing. It might take me a few days.

[Mari DeRuntz]

Hi John,

Just a quick note on flesh/hair tones. I don

[Denise Racine]

Hello John,

Please forgive me if I used the wrong word.

Please don't forget that I am French Canadian and I usually do everything in French so I am probably not using the appropriate word. What I meant was that something doesn't look real, like it couldn't really be that way in life. I definitely wasn't thinking Salvator Dali. I will be more careful with my choice of words in the future.

[John Zeissig]

Mark, Denise and Mari,

Thanks very much for taking the time to comment on this painting. It's been really illuminating in several ways. I saw immediately that the jpeg as posted was off in color. It does read as almost a sepia-toned flesh/hair combination in the post, but the painting is not nearly this uniform. I've spent almost enough time trying to digitally correct it as I would need to paint another one, and I'm still unable to get it to look like the original. I've looked at it on four different computer/monitor combinations and each one has its idiosyncracies.

For the record, the fleshtones were painted using raw umber, titanium white, raw sienna, yellow ochre, cad. red medium, ivory black and terre verte. The hair was done using burnt umber, indian yellow, alizarin crimson, titanium white and ivory black. In the actual painting the skin has a distinctly more olive cast than the hair. Kim is Asian, and her skin has a different color than the typical Caucasian skin.

The jpeg in the post was shot using my son's Sony digital camera, downloaded in jpeg format to a Toshiba laptop, loaded to a floppy disc, transferred to an older Mac clone, resized to conform to the forum requirements, and finally attached to the post. Somewhere along the line it got more red everywhere, and there seems to be nothing I can do about it. But I can have Kim stand next to the actual painting, and everyone agrees that the skin color is a pretty good match, and so is the hair (although it is dyed and tipped, not her natural color).

I think what I'm getting at here is that there are limits to the amount of help that can be offered through cyberspace. For anything other than the more obvious aspects it requires that we have an accurate reproduction of the original. When I go to apply the suggestions to the painting itself I have my doubts. I would guess that the fix would be to have more complementary colors in the shadows and in the mid tones of the more lighted areas. I've tried this digitally to some extent, but the effect has not been encouraging, and I'm not excited about repeating the experiment with paint. I think the best I can do at this point is to bear the advice in mind for future paintings.

I'll post a detail and some of the reference material in the hope that it may clarify the earlier discussion about Mark's points and some of my comments above.

Here is the eye detail, hopefully showing some of what is missing or not apparent in the original jpeg

[John Zeissig]

This and the next post are reference photos. The actual painting was done from a drawing based on both of these photos.

[John Zeissig]

The other one.