I’ve come to a point where I feel I have no choice and must start over.
I worked a lot on the face today putting down the whole right socket of the eye and working back into what I’ve already painted. But, every time I put down a color it looked wrong, it would never match what I was mixing on my palette. This is even when I have my palette upright and in the exact same light as the canvas. I even put my palette next to what I was painting and everything on the canvas was much too dark.
I even tried painting the exact same gray of my palette background over the face and comparing how colors looked next to this but even the color of the palette matched perfectly looked too dark. After some contemplation I wiped off all the work I did today with solvent.
This is going to be a challenge to figure out but there is one thing I’m sure of. I’ve lost the spark of life that accompanies a new painting and if I continue on this route my quality will be compromised. So I must start from the beginning and gesso the canvas again but this time I will start with my normal light gray background. It seems like a lot of redo work but I need to get this painting as well as my motivation back on track and start of with positive results.
One theory I have currently is that my palette, which I placed to the left of my canvas, may be getting much more light than my canvas and throwing off my mixtures. I will have to do some testing to get this back in order.
