Too Much Gray

The addition of oil paint to this figure is going well at least for the value, but right after finishing this session I realized that I had painted the colors with entirely too much gray.

I pulled the image I’m working from and my painting into Photoshop and pulled some simple color swatches off of the photo and compared them with the painting.

With all of these little color dots I seen a few consistent mistakes. First, all of the correct colors are much more warm, even in the shadow areas. Next, my value is off especially in the shadow areas, I need to have some darker values. Last, all the correct color are more intense (higher chroma) than what I actually painted. I didn’t know I could learn so much from doing this simple test. I’m going to have to do it more in the future.