We had our usual Friday Night Painting Club at Jeremy's house last night and the painting is really looking about finished now. The background color was way to distracting and even with the tone of the skin, so I darkened it to pop the lighter toned warm colors in their faces. Now their the focus again. I also did another pass on Dallia and smoothed out the skin tones. I also added some more paint to the dress and flowers but am keeping things towards the bottom pretty abstract still. Jeremy was nice enough to point out that Darrens back hand only had 3 fingers so I added a pinki!

round 3 or so

This is the 1st posting on a portrait I'm working on for some recently married friends, Darren and Dalia Mitchel.
I had taken a bunch of pictures of this painting, documenting all the steps but unfortunately my computer deleted all the pictures. So here it is about half way, everything is established and I already took a second pass at Darren's head. For this one I started with a really detailed drawing because its an old friend and I wanted to make sure I got the likeness down. After a few nights of painting everything is laid in and I've just added a background color. I really like to leave parts of the painting raw and unfinished like the jacket and flowers, keeping your attention to the heads and expressions. Even their hair is pretty simple, the white highlights on his is the white canvas below.