(reviewing old work) Painting 2: Happy Gracie!

This is one of my most recent paintings, and probably one I am most proud of. It was a gift to my sister and her fiance, of their daughter. It was important to me that I chose to paint an image that captured her happy spirit, so when i took this picture:

... I knew I found the image I was looking for! There are a few changes that I made to my own painting that you can see by looking at the original photo.
For instance:

• the background. I found that the background in the photo was too distracting, so I opted for a simple beige background in my painting, making the baby the main focus of the painting.
• her skin tone. hot clammy days make the skin red and generally not the best to photograph. So in my painting, I created a more even skin tone.

parts of the painting I'm happy with:

With every painting, I learn something new. With this particular painting, I learnt the effectiveness of combining cool toned colours for shadow with warm toned colours for highlights. You can see how I used a blue around Gracie's face whilst I used a warm skin-tone for the rest of the face. I found that this really helped the image look more realistic, and it is a trick I now use in all of my paintings.



I usually paint mouths last (probably because I don't find them as exciting to paint as, say, eyes) but this time, I payed more attention to the mouth, because I wanted to be sure the gums looked like gums (its not something you paint very often!). I am very happy with the way the mouth turned out, and I think the glint just under the tougue shows the texture of the mouth.