Lorna & Dennis

Interesting portrait painted in a very colourful style. I see you are a fan of Charles Reid. I have just returned from a course with him and on the last day he treated us to a masterclass in portrait painting - quite amazing. I think you have had an excellent stab at his loose and colourful style, but if I can just try and second guess what Charles would say, I think he would feel that the yellow/green on the faces is a little too prominent and strong. The colour works brilliantly on the hat, just not quite so well on the face. Many people think that Charles Reid deliberately puts all sorts of colours on a face when he is doing a portrait, but this isn't the case. He picks colours because they are the right tone and not because of the colour that they are - if that makes sense. We kept asking him what colour he was using and his reply was always 'Don't think about the colour, just think about the tone'. I hope this helps. I did write a diary of the five days of Charles's teaching and this is on my POL blog 'A Watercolour Journey' and I describe in detail how he painted several portraits - just in case it would be of any interest to you.

Thank you so much Thea. This is why I subscribe to this site -for objective and intelligent feedback. I suppose I thought I was working in a similar style to Charles Reid, whilst only viewing glimpses of his videos and therefore not really appreciating the underlying methodology. It seems Charles is viewing his composition as a monochrome, only choosing tones and not colours. In a way I adopted this approach choosing a limited primary pallets, with the yellow simplistically showing the lights and cerulean the shadow areas! However I can see there are two mistakes with this approach: Firstly, the yellow has a tonal value beyond the light it is supposed to be representing,and secondly, yellow and blue make green, which apart from being an odd skin tone, provides a tonal value somewhere between yellow and blue, where yellow is too dark in the first place. All this goes to show how totally in control of his medium Charles Reid is, and that, like most things, experts make difficult things seem easy. I may have another go because I think this can compliment my style but I think I might work out my tones before hand with swatches. Thank you once agin for taking the trouble to write.