Critique on Portrait? (newbie alert)

Can you link the reference?

Okay, I'll just use the ref when talking about values.

I think you did a good job picking the colors and establishing hard and soft edges.
The brushwork is fine, so I feel it looks off to you because of the values and the underlying structure needs a little adjustment.

I tried to keep the original style in tact! The first thing I did was adjust the eye to the right and make the face a little less slanted.

You did great with defining the features, but I felt like some of the edges were too sharp and dark around the chin and eyes. Like you mentioned, there was a lot going on with the shadows so I made her cheek on the left softer and made the highlight darker. I think the focal points are the highlights on her forehead, nose and cheeks. With that in mind, it's good to create less contrast in other places so they don't clash and it's easier for the eyes to move around the piece.

To make it stand out a little more I made the background a little darker around her face.

Hope this helps!

I'll post some questions that you can help us with to go through your critique.

---What is your intention for this piece?
Is it to study value?
Is it to study Expressions which is what the intention of the set of reference photos was for?
Is it to study painterly strokes? If so which master?

---- Do you want us to paint-over your image in order to illustrate our critique theory?

Is this the image set?

I'm going to assume that this is the image set that you are talking about.

If you post it like this so we can compare the screen cap of the image at low rez with the snipping tool app, or screen cap low rez zoomed out, no one is going to get upset since it's a study, you aren't supplying the entire set or high resolution original to the public. I think you would in fact be promoting it for free. You didn't pay Ol' Noah Dollar Signs a commercial licensing fee for 629 images (the whole set) and we aren't paying you to see it, you paid for personal use of the images which you are doing...but....We can't help you as much as we are able without the reference. Until you do we will have limited ways to help.

Yes, that.

As well as you have an extremely high value range which doesn't help for an expressive portrait painting, and entirely too many tiny strokes to describe simple forms of the nose, mouth, chin, eye sockets and iris.

The highest contrast areas are going to attract the viewers eyes the most. This is the hair in your case. There is no interest there so we must look elsewhere but the high contrast pulls us back to the hair because that's how our eyes work. It pulls us into the low contrast ear

If you want this image to look painterly, Use a bigger brush and dont go below say...20 pixels for details.

Well thats impossible since this image reference set is ruined by the insane amount of ambient light everywhere.

This set, has a key light, bounce light from a screen of some kind, and a warm lamp. That's three sources. It looks like a magazine. It looks great and whatever but I think this is so you can see all of the proportions of expressions.

You can see that the overall shadow shape has all of the detail in it because of all this effing bounce light AND THEN an ambient light via a lamp on the floor, but it makes it almost impossible for a student to study the different forms of portraiture composition, shadow shapes, simple shapes and facial structure. It looks confusing as hell to paint for someone new.

If you are a student and a newbie this expression set is not for expressive portrait painting. Its for studying expressions themselves.

Can you please elaborate and describe what it is that you dont like about it? It will help you with your understanding and critiquing your own work, as well as help you write your intention. You need to trust your first instincts. Being able to decipher shape language and describe it is half the battle.

And when you write your intention use this for an example.

"My intention is to study the human female Caucasian face, in the style of Sargent/Rembrandt/Pyle/Wyeth/Zorn/Frazetta or whoever, I want to express painterly style and gain understanding of compositon"

I'll leave you with this quote from Howard Pyle,
“The function of all art instruction should be to teach the pupil to
analyze and to separate the lights from the darks, not technically but
mentally. That which a pupil most needs in the beginning is not a system
of arbitrary rules and methods for imitating the shape of an object;
that which he needs to be taught is the habit of analyzing lights and
shadows and of representing them accordingly. Until the pupil is
entirely able to separate those two qualities of light and shadow from
one another in his perception, he should not be advanced beyond the
region of elementary instruction – no matter how clever and fetching his
work may appear to be. That separation is fundamental to the law of
Nature, and until it becomes a habit of thought, no spontaneous work of
art can be produced.”

If you can wait till next week I'll get the reference pack myself and do a paintover. Prepare questions and your intention and post them but also please read through a few of my other critiques they may help.

@LesleyCarol thanks you rock I can get started on the lesson tonight!

Part 1. Understanding our reference.

Okay,

So I took the photograph and first wanted to illustrate how many light sources are actually on the figure.

Now I'm not saying that this is bad. This is just extremely challenging for a portrait painting. The amount of light sources that you have to achieve in a painting are at most two sometimes three.

We have a flat surface that we are trying to make the illusion of three dimensions on. The easiest way to do this is control of our painting and subject. By composing the light's contrast. The viewers eye path.

There are very few life drawing sessions that I've been to where there is a secondary light source, let alone 5.

Traditionally, (and I may have heard this theory elsewhere but in my opinion ) this limitation allows artists to control the environment and composition to allow them to play. And thus where they want you the viewer to focus and how they will express themselves through mark making.

If I only have one light source I have more control over the kinds of transitions that I have to play with (value, hue and saturation and mark making) and wether or not they have the effects that I the artist desire in my finished piece.

If I have many light sources this limits my room to play with these tools of transition of form, value color and mark making abstraction. All these take a backseat to the laws of physics I now have to follow in order to illustrate what I see to the viewer (if that is after all my intent) . Especially if I am copying for the sake of studying.

Its the difference of being able to dance through a barn door in the dancing style I want vs having to crawl through a shoulder width air vent. In one anything can happen. In the other, there is only one direction to the exit. Which one is more fun? Which one is more challenging?

Moving on.

Now lets do some editing for the sake of studying this picture. First lets make it the direction you posted your study and line it up.

If we do some simple sight size orientation for comparison we can see where the measurements were 'off' and what didn't exactly feel right.

Now this isn't how we draw! This isn't fun! This is the way we critique and find flaws in our work before we show it to anybody. lol

One way we can do this to practice sight size orientation without it being a so much of a handicap, or as shown above, a boring pain in the a**, is to just drop a line that we will erase later.

But in order to drop a line accurately to digitally study a photo we need to work within the same frame ratio so we can compare our work to the original.

Old masters chose the size of the work they made based on the spaces in which they would be permanently hung. They mathematically decided the best compositional frame ratio which also decided their best oe perhaps expressive composition for the room, not just the frame. So for studying masters compositions, and studying photographs the beefing up your sight size orientation.

Like so.

Now here comes the interesting part. Regardless of your skill we can see where you characterized the drawing. All the greats caricature even a little bit.

We can see what you decided to repress on her, what you decided to emphasize on her and what you decided to leave untouched! This can tell us about your subconscious tastes in the female form. Where you see yourself, your mother, a family member. What your left side of your brain decides is the correct symbol for a nose, chin eye and ear and takes over to replicate that symbol instead of letting your right brain take over and use the shapes in front of your eyes.

In order to shut down the left side of the brain we need an easily unrecognizable inorganic reference point. This is the dropped line.

You choose where, anywhere. I just chose the inner socket of the furthest eye here. You can put it anywhere you like.

For the sake of this critique we are going to edit this picture for or expressive needs, our understanding of form and finally our understanding of composition.

To isolate the main light on the light side, the central light, I tried a few different ways to illustrate what I mean and this is one way you can try to use to simplify a complicated light source.

I did it again to illustrate my purpose even further.

We did it. Through the magic of Photoshop we finally were able to find and show you the main light source. Your path to separate the light and the dark becomes clear. With this information we can paint more confidently. I now am understanding that crazy occlusion shadow that the floor lamp is making on her jaw, it's there in order to make a jaw line definition which was lost in the ambient light.

Part 2. Drawing and painting the head. Coming soon.