Once I felt like I had a handle on values, I started to tackle color--still using celebrity photos as references. Going from 11 shades of gray to an essentially infinite range of colors turned out to be even more daunting than I expected. You'd think that someone who has been making pretty good art since I was two, I'd have picked up some color wisdom somewhere along the line. While I certainly know more about color than the average person, I pretty much spent my younger years working with the pre-established colors that came with crayon, marker, and pencil sets. I never really had any experience mixing color until my oil painting class, in which I produced only four pieces in color, one of which was an abstract image in which getting the color right wasn't all that important. Since then I have been blindly trying to figure it out on my own, and while I think I've done a pretty good job on at least some of my portraits, overall my use of color is pretty amateur. And it involves a lot of wasted paint, as my good results come only after a lot of blind trial and error.
Okay so my first foray into using doing a digital portrait in color (besides my other first) actually turned out pretty well. To be fair, it's much easier to pick colors on a computer, where you can just click around and undo it if it doesn't look right. Even so, I tried to use a limited palette on all of these, as I would in an oil painting.
Before you criticize my second one, I'd just like to point out that Jean-Paul Sartre actually did have a lazy eye; that's not a mistake. And his skin color did look a little sickly in the reference photo as well. Before I did this one I read some online tutorials about portrait painting, and I learned that I could get a lot more mileage out of just different shades of orange than I had previously thought. In my other paintings, when you see something that looks purple, it actually is purple. In this painting, the shadows only look purple in relation to the surrounding colors; all of the colors on the face are within the orange range--that is, somewhere between pure red and pure yellow. In another post I talked about afterimages; that's when your eye gets tired looking at one color so when you look away you see its opposite. Painters use that to their advantage: When you look at this mostly orange painting, your eye gets tired of seeing orange and starts picking out the subtleties better, yielding what looks like purple or even green in some areas. From here on out, all my portraits stay within the orange range, except sometimes for highlights and makeup effects.
I think I did my portrait of Ben Kingsley (at the top of this page) after the Sartre portrait. It turned out a little weird--I actually matched the colors I used with the colors in the photograph, which is not always the best idea. It looks really good as a thumbnail, and I still like it overall, but there's just something weird about the color combination.
For this one I forgot to use my fancy chalk brush, so it looks more airbrushed. I kind of like how it turned out though. It's a little sloppy in places; I sort of forgot about the neck halfway through so the coloring doesn't really match the face, and the hand and shirt are obviously very unfinished. At a certain point I just declared myself done based on how long I'd spent on it rather than how finished it actually looked. I also "cheated" on this one, using the liquify tool and some other digital tricks. At this point I was trying to use all of these as practice for oil paintings, so I tried not to do that, but oh well.
In between the last couple of these I was reading a portrait painting book, which helped a lot. Something painters talk a lot about is the relationship between "warm" and "cool" colors, which apparently is intuitive for everyone else but I've driven myself up the wall trying to figure out what on earth that means. I mean, yeah. Red is warmer than blue, I get that part. But it's really complicated, and I have had a hard time training my eye to see which parts of the face are supposed to be warm and which ones are supposed to be cool. I did this painting after a sort of "breakthrough" in that area, but I still had/have a long way to go from there. And yes, believe it or not, all that stuff on her face that looks green is actually yellow-orange.
The last couple I did were "speed paintings" in which I gave myself a solid time limit and tried not to worry about getting all the details right. I wanted to get more practice with color rather than getting bogged down in the details, since I already know I can do details if I want to. So I don't know how much this actually looks like Carl Sagan, but I did a good job with the color relationships.
It's a lot more obvious with this one that I went quickly, since the teal background is showing through. This overly dramatic photo of Antonio Banderas was just too awesome not to do a painting of.
I finished up my celebrity series with a self-portrait. I've always wanted to be famous, so maybe there was something subconscious there. Unlike the last black and white painting I did, I don't feel like I really "got it" with this series. I'm still a long way away from being able to use color in the mature way I'd like to. This has been more of an exercise in getting my feet wet and learning to be okay with less-than-perfect results.