Peter's Sketchbook

[Peter]

Cool oil figurative oil painting! Some feedback for the recent oil painting of that seated old guy would be to pay closer attention to the vlues. The reflected lights you're doing in the oblique area (right side of his belly area) is much too light and should be much darker. Reflected light is a cool effect, but is very easily overdone. To work around this, simply squint more with your eyes when deciding the values on your painting. This will remove any detail that is not necessary at this point, and will simplify values a lot! Keep in mind that you had the tendency of exaggerating the reflected light, so what I would do first is just to paint the shadow value and only after that lighten the edge up just a little bit so you get that subtle reflected light effect. A saying is that the lightest shadow is darker than the darkest halftone.

Values are always more important than color in a painting, or at least if you want to depict something realistically. For the shadow colors that you have, the color of the shadow on his right side of his chest + shoulder + upper arm is pretty close i'd say, it's just a little too purple and should be going more towards a warm brown. What confuses me is that on the reference picture, all the shadows of the figure are in that sort of warmish brown with areas that are a little bit less saturated such as the legs. In your painting though, you have a lot of difference between your shadow colors. You have that purplish color for the shadow on his right chest + upper arm, then you have a very greenish color for the shadow on his abdomen and his left leg, and then a very desaturated grayish purple for his left arm. They need to be more in line with eachother basically :)

Super cool, I love figurative oil painting so keep practicing, getting accurate flesh tones is super hard!

Keep it up!

Hey Uiriamu thanks for giving me such a detailed critique :)

I'm planning on working on oding more paintings now and try and really improve skill wise, so I'll focus on tackling my problem areas that you pointed out.

Yh flesh tones are a bitch! I don't have more practice mixing flesh tones so it's definitely something that I find really challanging. I think I pigeonhold myself and focused on specific areas rather than takcling the piece as awhole which explains the missmatch of shadow colours.

I'm taking some more oil painting classes so expect to see more over the next few weeks :)