Seen a ghost?

Not a successful portrait this time... Painted over two weeks, I used a larger canvas so thought I could take the picture in stages but think I committed one of the cardinal sins of painting.

I thought that I might have more luck if I treated the different sections of the subject as whole areas. Not a bad idea as such, but it meant that by starting with all of the skin, I thought I had got the changing contrasts right. However, it wasn't until I then started to add in the darks of the hair, eyes, lips and blue drapes behind the model that I realised I had painted the whole of the skin far too light. The shifting contrasts might have been right relative to one another, but tonally the whole area was way out.

I had extra time on this one (rather than the previous single sitting portraits I've done on the painting class previously) but still not enough to correct it. I felt incredibly bad for the sitter - she was actually a pretty girl, with a very delicate bone structure, but the finished study emphasised that too much and made her look very severe - like a skeleton in a wig.

Next week we will be painting the same model across four sittings so I think I need to take my time on that one and work across the portrait in chunks, to keep the colours and tones more cohesive. And not offend the sitter.

- Steve Pill, Editor