@urrubbish3
So after reading your statement and trying to get a clearer picture of what you learned during your painting I'll try not to add any moot points. The last one though I thought I could help you with.
So I don't know if the photo was necessarily "bad". But you definitely chose the wrong reference for painting saturated colors.
It might have been a poor screen cap or something because I found another couple of photo's of the same shoot day and the color was way different.
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And then I even found a different version of your original shot.
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So I don't know what is going on. Maybe go on history channel or amazon prime and freeze the show on your own screen to see how the director wanted it to look. Straight from the source.
That being said.
I actually think your painting was nice, because you pulled off something that you weren't even able to see. I actually really enjoy the pallet. I think the opportunity that you missed however was painting a dull painting, which can be extremely educational.
By making your pallet duller, you have to choose your colors more wisely, and it takes a bit of time because it is so subtle. Each time I chose the color for shadow shapes, mid tones and highlights for the example below I stayed very close to the same region of the color saturation, and brightness. However the hue was warm, cool, neutral, all over the place which made for a challenging painting.
When I started life drawing there was this old artist there who had been painting for decades and people often asked him beginner questions which he hated. Someone asked one day, "what about grey?" And he literally screamed, "Gray, gray, GRAAAAY!! I could paint my whole life in grey and you'd say, "oh what amazing colors!" And I never forgot that.
Anyhow, my point is that every time you choose a color from the wheel, look at your reference, blur your eyes, and look at an overall section, make the color in the color wheel, and paint a swatch. Is your color more or less darker/lighter, duller/saturated, warm/cool. For each one ( saturation, brightness, hue) paint a new swatch over your old one till you get it perfect.
Do that EVERY TIME, for every color, and you will start to learn to mix colors.
Here's my first try at getting this bounce light on the left side of his head.
Then see how much the color wheel changed after I got as close as I could?
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And then here is the actual color, got pretty close!
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My point is that you can learn a lot despite what your reference is. This shot probably had those light reflectors every where so that they could even see his face which makes for difficult paintings, but not impossible.
There is the possibility that the director wanted it that way, (we wont know until we see the original screen cap) But think of it in metaphorical terms. I prefer food ones. You wanted a piece of candy, probably a green apple jolly rancher. Maybe the director wanted moldy lintle soup...?
I hope that helps, whatever flavor you choose. Great effort and put another notch on that axe.
