After tossing and turning in my sleep, I just had to go back and lighten this background. I like the lighter background so much better. What do you think??

This portrait is of newborn baby Evan. Personally, I have actually wanted to paint a baby portrait for a quite sometime. So this was a perfect situation! I wanted to capture the aoftness and joys that babies bring into the world. I have used soft, light colors in this palette. I did research by contemporary American painter Jonathan Janson on Vermeer at http://howtopaintavermeer.fws1.com/index.htm

I wanted to examine the way Vermeer used color, shadows, and glazes to create a dramatic effect on the figure. In this case, I did not want to portray the baby in shadows in order to illumininate. I am in the process of pushing in accents of shadows within the folds of the blanket to create depth while keeping the overall figure bright and light. One technique I felt that was very good in portraying skin tones is to include the use of yellow ochre, white, and vermillion on the warmest areas of the skin, then just yellow ochre on the warm areas and blending down in tone from there, saving a splash of white here and there for the reflections of light. I consider this article to be a great resource for painting illuminating skin tones. This work looks very vibrant in person.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 6:17 pm and is filed under People Portraits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.