Painting Sierra
My painting seems as though it is progressing well, although building facial values from abstract colours is more difficult than I anticipated. In theory when painting something in an abstract style implies that the colours used would be arranged in a way that is contrary to the norm, which in turn implies a sense of randomness when applying the colours. However using this method to construct my portrait has given me a painting without any clear structure to the facial features- resulting in a two dimensional, unconvincing messy mess.
In hindsight my problem lies in the tonal value of my colours, when they are abstract this value is not clear and is often contradictory to how ‘light or dark’ I think the colour is. To remedy this I decided to photograph my work and print it out in black and white. By doing this I am left only with the tonal values and it becomes much easier to see where I am going wrong.
I think it is very clear from the photos that that the colours I’ve used are far too dark, dense and monotone in their value. Even though the face is made up of different colours; they all appear to be the same tone. In fairness even looking at the colour photo it is easy to tell that something is very wrong. I think it is much easier to see defects through a photo (whether black and white or colour) due to the fact that you can see the painting as a whole and see how the colours are reacting to one another as a complete picture.
My plan is to repaint the Light values (I say light values- there are no light values- what I actually mean is repaint the ‘extremely dark but were meant to be light values’) and make them substantially lighter. Then I will gradually build up the face tone by tone until the values are correct.
