Happy New Year and welcome to 2012! The first of a number of New Year commissions for me begins with this beautiful serene old photograph. The client wants me to add colour for the portrait. The young girl in the photo is her grandmother, she is albino and has amazing violet eyes. I sketched the picture on canvas board and started blocking in the background with paynes gray and burnt sienna for warmth. I want to make her face the focal point and give her an almost luminescent quality so starting dark gave me immediate contrast. Next I picked out the lighter areas with a warm cream I mixed up, then marked out the darker areas, like the folds in the fabric and the shadows on the chair, in paynes grey. At this stage I painted the face in monotone to get the shadows in the right place. By the third picture I have added more colours to the background, scumbled red and burnt sienna over her top and onto her cheeks and painted more of the chair. This tonal under-painting with her face being the lightest part of the canvas, gives me a good foundation on which to build up the detail. Keep watching...
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