Progress on Ellen

Here is some more progress on my daughter's birthday painting...

Stage four- added some yellow glaze to make things look more alive, had to be careful to avoid making her look jaundiced.

Step Five- Added some umber and some pink- her favorite color! I'm a little frustrated that the pink turned out so orange, but it does seem to match. I decided to take some artistic license and trade the morning glories for gerber daisies, or some vague pink daisy looking flower. She's a fun, silly, high energy kid, so why not go with whimsy over realism? But she 's starting to look sort of sad...
Step Six- As she is so bold, I decided to increase the contrast with some black and white and threw in a little purple while I was at it to help tie the pinks and blues together. I'm SO close but I'm not sure what it needs. I know that the right eye needs work, the glint doesn't quite look natural. Several students have been making comments; unfortunatly they're not all positive. One thinks she looks too old. The black and purple do kind of suggest eye liner and shadow. Another thought she's too brown/dark. One thought that the eyes are too big and with the black, they look like Japanese Anime. They are a little too big, but I reasoned that it added to the child-like feel so that's okay.

Here's a larger view. At right is a photo of the painting I did last year for her older sister. It didn't help, I wasn't able to match the styles so I just went in a new dirrection. At left is the photo I used for inspiration. If this was a project by a student, I'd probably give them grief about how the eyes are angled, like in the photo, but the nose and mouth are straight like in a head-on portrait. I had the same problem a couple of years ago on a watercolor that I tried to do of Benjamin Franklin. I just hope that in five or ten year when she's a teen/adult she doesn't hate it and feel embarassed by the goofy painting her dad tried to do of her when she was five.

Scroll down a ways to see how this painting started (steps 1-3) last week.

Click here to see and read about her sister Grace's painting