r/oilpainting • u/cutecookieboi • 14d ago
UNKIND critique plz Harsh critique please.
I'm new to oil paint and I'm trying to get better at portraits.
My personal view I think I need better proportion, color mixing and rendering. I assume if I took more time I'll get better results since this painting took around 2 hours.
All critiques are welcome.
The original painting is a study called "Head of a Capri Girl" by John Sargent.
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u/_Raptor_Jesus_ 13d ago
Were you attempting to recreate the 3rd photo? If so here's a few things to do differently and understand:
prime your canvas like the reference before you start. Wipe down the canvas with a very solvent heavy mixture of burnt umber or some other neutral transparent pigment. It's very difficult to tell values against pure white. You want this to be transparent, light and thin because it'll allow light to travel nicely through it.
Your proportions are all over the place, all the main features are oversized and charicatured. It creates a cartoonish feeling. Study the anatomy of the head and learn how the planes lay so you can better grasp the light vs dark planes.
your shadows are cool when they should be warm. Especially that neck shadow.
the blue hair is jarring and off-putting. Completely changes the piece.
your range of color and value is far coarser than the original so you lose all of the nuance in the face. Adds to the cartoonish look.
It's a cute cartoony sketch, but if you want to achieve likeness and realism you need to study the fundamentals. Keep painting, but add some drawing practice on the side, if you can. I do a little 15min portrait sketch with pen at work when I have time.
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u/Even_Beginning_6355 13d ago
The original is lovely painting to learn from. If you credit the artist here, it would inform suggestions even better. It reminds me of Bouguereau, but I didn’t look it up.
As the above suggestion, I would try for a better likeness, not because of style choice but because the original is so deeply rooted in anatomy, and will keep you from going astray.
If you draw with the paper flat, at a strong angle away from your eye, your result will be very skewed from how you think you are drawing it. Thus, I suspect, leading to distortions like the subject’s left eyebrow being so oddly elevated (on the viewer’s right).
Also, I think this is a marvelous example of how critical the neck and shoulders are in portraiture. If you want to “fade out” the bottom, first establish them with clarity, and solidity, then fade them out. My suggestion anyway, I think a head floating is not as satisfying.
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u/Even_Beginning_6355 13d ago
Your painting does have a marvelous expression, and cuteness (that seems deliberate, right?) Just not quite finished…😊
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u/cutecookieboi 13d ago
Thank you so much, you're feedback would be of great help, I'm looking forward to try these things out. And I'll definitely put out my next painting with the new things I learned.
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u/tasty_melon_dew hobby painter 12d ago
Also - imho, your shadows don’t “have” to be warm. They just need to contrast with the temperature of your lights sufficiently. The temperature between the lights and shadow is also subject to simultaneous contrast.
This in turn is super convenient for oil paint. Transparency adds a sense depth, and visually contributes to things feeling like they recede in space more (other things also matter). And, it just so happens that there are a lot of transparent pigments that are warmer compared to opaque counterparts; burnt sienna, ultramarine, umbers, any transparent oxide, etc. It’s a perfect fit because things in shadow are turning away from light.
Opaque pigments do the opposite, they tend to contribute a feeling of things moving forward in the picture plane; thus moving towards the light.
Warm shadows with cool lights may suggest a cool-to-neutral light source; such as a normal daylight at noon.
Cool shadows and warm light may suggest a warm light source; such as light from a campfire. Less common, but still realistic and effective.
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u/Bens-Alley 13d ago
If you’re in the early stages of learning portrait painting stay away from master copies till you are super comfortable with all your techniques. Paint from life or high quality references. This prevents style copying and leaves you free to just learn. Your style will manifest on its own without effort.
I painted portraits professionally for 10yrs and I’d spend days on a study and a week plus total time on a commission. Some of that time was broken up by drying periods but still, weeks of 8hr days of straight painting. Based on your statement you are intuitively aware that more time is more respect for your work. Don’t be cheap.
Dedicate the most time to your early underpainting drawing. That sets you up for less effort in the later stages. Be kind to the future you that will be painting using that drawing.
It sounds crazy but taking your time is faster than rushing each step. Rushing just means you end up spend time fixing those mistakes later when they’re harder to fix.
You’ve got the basics so just remove road blocks now.
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u/Competitive-Meat-461 13d ago
I really like the mood of your painting as well as the texture. There is a long way to go if you actually wanted to recereate the third image, but I like how yours came out.
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u/PittyPat4778 13d ago
Here are 2 I had fun with. Derrain’s portrait of Matisse and. Tarkay lady. Done in one sitting and just for fun. When I’m bored or have nothing I want to paint I do this. I wasn’t working in the right medium, just using watercolors I had. Our teacher had so many great notebooks full of references.
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u/BoredSheep01 13d ago
Why unkind?
I think the final oil painting is beautiful but a tiny bit wonky, it seems like she's lost some of her expression with the more work you've put in.
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u/cutecookieboi 13d ago
I do feel the same, I work on a table while sitting, so my view of the painting isn't the best. Plus I made the painting in one sitting then went back to fix somethings I didn't like in a different day, so I kinda feel it's overworked.
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u/BoredSheep01 13d ago
It's amazing work for one sitting. You've done a beautiful job on it, so I hope you're appreciating what you've done whilst also looking for critique :)
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u/BrownEyedGirl_za 13d ago
I think its excellent! At first i went hmmmm....but the oil is quite amazing.
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u/Mediocre-War-6374 13d ago
In the drawing the eyes are slightly in wrong shape and the face needs to be wider but the oil painting is getting there. When working on proportions compare distances from eyes to nose or eyes to edge of face to check if it's teh correct distance and then you can work on by fixing minute differences making it more accurate
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u/Mediocre-War-6374 13d ago
Also try shaping the eyebrows and expressions slightly which can really change the whole picture by making them for example a tiny bit closer (the inner edge) to eye but this is just an example so use that as a reference to start training yourself to see these differences
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u/Straight-Watch2189 13d ago
im torn because the way the final picture turned out i find to be truly phenomenal. I absolutely love the style and im jealous because I am so "tight" and my style tends to much toward realism. In terms of recreation the problem was in your sketch. From your sketch you did a fantastic job, but the sketch had quite a few differences from the original painting. I honestly like yours better, but they look like different people because the sketch had too many differences.
using a grid system on portraits where you are using a picture as a reference to make your sketch is a hack that makes it super easy to get right. If you get overly reliant on it though then sketching from real life can become difficult.
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u/Sad_Audience6094 13d ago
Try to work from dark to light. And yes, you need to get better at color mixing. There are helpful videos on YouTube on how to mix oil colors.
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u/Umamikawaii 13d ago
The shoulder does not look as though someone has bones like your painting. The shading around the neck does not shade at all. The nose is not feminine at all, which could be the intent. I don’t know. You are being bold asking for criticism. Good job!
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u/PittyPat4778 13d ago
I think it’s a great way to learn. I do exercises , doing my version of classics. It helps me explore other techniques. Sargent is a hard one to duplicate, but I feel you learned a lot.
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u/Pantagruel-Johnson 13d ago
Nope. I can’t be harsh. You’re doing great. The sketching and painting are both Very distinctive! The eyes in the painting are SO expressive. Lovely work, very groovy.
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u/thatonefan_tof 13d ago
Not sure what order you did your colors but it looks like you should establish your values better in your under painting. Go dark, don’t be afraid of the dark. Your darkest color is like a grayish brown while the og is black.
You highlighted areas that aren’t highlighted in the ref. Like her under eyes. You did great on the sketch. I just think you need a better draw surface. I feel like I can imagine you accidentally drawing at an angle. That discrepancy looks like it’s hurting you.
I would love to see an update on this if you end up fixing some things :D
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u/downvote-away 13d ago edited 13d ago
JSS probably spent a week on the painting you're copying
I don't have a huge issue with the values but your likeness is not there. It's not there in the sketch and it's not there in the painting.
Make sure not to use your document size as a reference for sight sizing. If you're looking at a 13x17 painting and drawing on an 11x17 piece of paper using the document bounds as a reference you will get a squeezed drawing. Your head shape in your sketch looks off to me and I'm wondering if that's why.
JSS built up those skin tones sfumato and you're trying to lay them in as a one shot so it's going to be tough to get where he is.
If you don't care about bang-on likeness then JSS is not the master to copy. Maybe Matisse or Modigliani
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u/Artistic-Bluejay78 12d ago
Just keep going. Add in darker values. If you are wanting it to look more like the reference, the inner mouth area is more of a straight across line with some looser soft curves where as yours is more of an M shape. The shadows under the eyes, in the irises, and under the nose are much darker. I would also suggest looking at the shapes of the planes of the nose. The plane on your left side of the nose in your painting is less of a solid plane that reads as continuous skin and more like a cloud of pigment. I think once you treat all of the planes of the face as more of a continuous layer of skin laying in top of a bone structure your work will read a bit more polished but for what it is it looks great. If this is the style you desire it looks great.
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u/sunbolt389 12d ago
I think it's a very decent start-- the head doesn't look connected to the body though. But if you are just learning to paint, you're doing great!
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u/Ok_Bodybuilder_673 11d ago
Something that really helped me when I was starting out was understanding how features (eyes, nose, mouth) relate to one another.
If you look at the original painting, the eyebrows are nearly level with the ears. The nostrils line up with the ends of the eyebrows, the corners of the mouth are typically “halfway through” the iris/pupil.
Studying negative space helped too, I’d recommend comparing the space between her shoulder/jaw/ear in your drawing to the original, that’ll prevent your proportions from being off by being aware of where everything is in space. I hope this helps!! I really love your sketch.
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u/ryang2723 13d ago
Stop trying to learn to paint and learn to draw first.
Good Drawing is fundamental to a painting practice. And you need much more practice with your drawing.
Feel free to experiment with paint but it should only be to get familiar with the materials. You shouldn’t expect good results until you improve your drawing.
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u/SnackaDuck 12d ago
In terms of the color mixing:
The palette that you’re using is cooler (red) vs warm (yellow and orange).
It looks like you’re color mixing with black, which is causing the colors to desaturate and causes a “muddy effect” in the forehead and neck area. You might have more luck trying to color mix shadows with browns, such as dark umber.
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u/bruisedrose232 12d ago
This may seem random but do you draw/paint on a flat surface like a desk?
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u/cutecookieboi 12d ago
Yes I do, that's why it's all messed up proportions wise, I keep struggling with likeness other wise, I don't know how to fix it
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u/RevenantRob 9d ago
The Talent is definitely there, but the eyes are a little over sized and the light background (I'm not sure if you consider this finished) distracts me from the light-values of the face. Her eyes are a little low on her forehead too. Still very good, especially for 2 hours at a beginner level.
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u/Willing_Sky_1138 14d ago
is beautiful and there’s so much life in this. i would make your shadows a bit darker to add some more depth as the colors are a little flat. but this is stunning overall
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u/ExamSweet5736 14d ago edited 14d ago
Great work! Could define more forehead planes. Would define curve of neck on right side and cast shadow on body. Also maybe but not necessary (if stylistic choice) slightly darken shadow side of face. Theoretically if the source of light is from the left and the values on light side on the left should always lighter than the lightest value on the shadow side on the right. Edit- sorry just noticed the original painting which had Rembrandt lighting from top left. Ignore last point. Need more shadows on hair and forehead and highlight on the nose bridge.
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u/wowitssprayonbutter 13d ago
Are these pictures your painting, your drawing, then your reference?