Posthumous portrait

[Tom Edgerton]

I'm posting this, just completed, not because it's at all innovative--I didn't attempt to bring in another pose or dress up the background--but I wanted to share a technique I used to work the color.

I've been dissatisfied in the past with working from black and white reference. With an absence of color information, the result had always looked like a sepia photograph because I made up the skin color mentally. So this time, I tinted the black and white photo with sepia to warm it up a little, and I posed my wife Linda in similar lighting and photographed her in color. With both references side-by-side on the monitor, I could draw and read value from the original subject reference, and use the photo of Linda for color. The result was more nuanced and realistic skin tones in the painting.

This piece was painted for a local college to replace one that was produced in the '40's and went missing some time later. It's the wife of a former president of the school--their "First Lady."