Commission-WIP

[Garth Herrick]

Barbara, I just expanded my explaination of a velatura, after I noticed you were already looking at it (just a couple of more sentences to help clarify things).

[Henry Wienhold]

Barbara the dark background is a good improvement and the shoulder is not as obvious as before. To me the whole composition looks more unified and complete. I think you've done a good job with the improvements that you have made here, but I have to agree with Garth. You might want to add some light into your background in places making it a little less solid in appearance creating a more atmospheric look to the composition, but keep it darker in value by that shoulder area, Good job!

Henry

[Barbara Mae Hudson]

Dear Garth,

Thank you again for all your help on this. I visited your thread 'Tom at Eleven', and I can only say.............. WOW! Words are not enough, I love it.

I will now go and investigate into VELATURA, it's one that I've never heard of before.

Thanks again.

Take care,

Barbara

[Barbara Mae Hudson]

[QUOTE=Garth Herrick]Hi Barbara,

I can see you have done quite a lot on this painting and it does look much better. I don't like your new brown background which is effectively competing as a foreground against your portrait subjects. The background brown is more strident and chromatically intense than any brown in either of the two kids. For example, the boy's brown stripe shirt should not appear to recede behind the background. I would kill the intensity of this brown with a velatura like I have described in the thread on my painting Apotheoun (page 4) http://forum.portraitartist.com/showthread.php?t=4136. It does not need to be much, a little goes a long way. You just want the background to be more atmospheric in perspective. It can be brown, but it has to be a quality of brown that relates well to everything else.

Hello again Garth,

I looked right through the above thread and yes, it was mentioned in it, but no explanation of what Velatura is. I put my google search engine to work on it and it came up with a lot of sites.........in Italian! The ones that were in English talked about enamel and varnishes which was not much help to me I'm afraid.

Would you be so good as to explain to me what Velatura is? I made a guess after reading your thread that it was maybe a milky scumble, but as my guesses are usually way off the mark I thought that I would check with you.

Thanks again for all your help.

Barbara

[Garth Herrick]

Barbara,

Yes, I am suggesting a milky scumble-glaze (velatura) as a simple technique to take the most strident qualities out of your intense brown, without otherwise changing the brushwork or structure of your painting. If you are subtle enough you will hardly see any change at all. Your painting will look essentially the same, except that the background will feel subliminally more atmospheric. Test the velatura on another surface first to see if it has the effect you want.

Garth