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Old 01-14-2003, 01:46 AM   #1
Steven Sweeney Steven Sweeney is offline
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You both gained and lost ground on the eyes. Consider:

1) In the photo, I don't see any of the whites of the eyes -- in either eye -- on our left side of the eyes. Yet I see a crescent of white alongside the iris in both the eyes in the painting, and it's pulling toward us a part of the eye that should be receding and saying "round".

2) The whites of the eyes that we can and should see, on our right, are too white. (Yeah, in the photo, too. Forget the photo.) Gray them down a bit, again to help round out the form. The bright, colorful irises should be closest to us.

3) The pupils are so small as to suggest the influence of some bright light behind the photographer. If this subject's pupils are in fact naturally small, all the time, then fine, that's a characterizing quality. But the tiny pupils are part of what's making the two eyes focus on markedly different points. Enlarge them just a bit and the effect is substantial. (They won't be quite so laser-beamed at small targets.)

4) The iris of the eye on our right has become oblong, rather than round.

Consider wiping out that eye on our right completely, and putting it in again. (I was once told to do that, and I protested that I'd never get the eye "right" again. The instructor was incredulous (it was the first time I'd seen him do a double-take, as if he couldn't believe what he'd just heard). "You'll have to," he said. And that was that. And I did.

And again, Squint! at the photo (as you would at the subject if this were from life). If you can't see a value when you squint, it likely doesn't even need to be in your painting. Otherwise, you're going to be overmodeling, or looking for lights within shadow areas.
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