 So...I have a real mess here. I need to fix it and in this article, I'm going to walk you through the steps I'm taking to do that. First, though, some context. This is a portrait of my cousin Katie with her daughter Adelaya. It's being done in acrylics. The first thing I'm going to need to do is cancel out this yellow.  To do counteract this, I glazed purple over the top.  To solve the problem of the blue being in too many places, first I glazed over the excess with orange. Orange is the compliment of blue, so it'll cancel it out somewhat.  Next on my agenda will be going over the orange bits with zinc white until they look sufficiently light to me.  Then I layered more of my flesh color over the whole thing to blend it in to the rest of the face more.  Finally, in an effort to get rid of the line of demarcation between the darkness and the rest of her skin, I layered some red over the edges, so it would look more like what was next to it.  I've tried everything I can think of to fix the problem at this point by layering. To recap, I layered orange over the excess blue to neutralize it. Then I layered zinc white over those parts to lighten them. I glazed more of my flesh color over the whole thing to try to blend the blue into the rest of the face and then I glazed red over the outer part of the blue. I've decided to start over from the underpainting at this point.  Now that I'm starting on my color again, I've started with my dark blue gray first.  Then, I started layering the main flesh color on top of that. At this point, I'm already four or five layers in.  I decided to glaze some orange over the blue, in an attempt to tone it down, so it doesn't stand out so much.  After looking at the photo for a while, I saw some noticable pink in the blue-grey shadows on Katie's forehead and left cheek.  Obviously this is just a bit too rosy, though. So I glazed green over it, which is the complement of red and pink, to create the look you see here.  I'd been realizing for a while that I had the blue shadows spread a bit too far. To rectify this, I mixed a bit of transparent raw sienna from the Liquitex heavy body line into some zinc white and layered that on the areas where I'd taken the blue-grey shadows too far.  Now about that orange spot in the middle of her forehead. I went over it with blue and it took the orange right out of it. I also used some flesh color that was slightly darker than what I had originally where the shdow merts the main color on her forehead. 
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 I once got a comment on one of my youtube videos telling me I was just drawing gourds with faces, so I decided to do exactly that. I have a Mommy Gourd, a Daddy Gourd, and two baby gourds. The message I want to convey here is not to let hate get you down. I can't think of any better way to stick it to your haters than to do exactly what they complained about. You can hear more about my thoughts and see the process of my drawing in the video embedded below. |