So Close to Completion

I am so close to being done with my latest painting I can taste it. It's a piece that I have been enjoying for the past couple of days and it is only a few hours from being done. The only thing left to do are some highlights and dark accents, then waxing. It's always good to step back before the final accents and evaluate the painting in case any adjustments need to be made.

As I look at the photo, I am starting to feel like the head may be a bit too big. Her forehead seems more like a "fivehead". This can easily be fixed by lowering her hair line but I don't think that is the only problem. The whole head seems large. I can't tell if it's her position that makes it seem so or if I just drew the head too large. The shadows and angles are a bit weird on the arms and her right leg so it looks like those limbs are smaller than they actually are which could be what gives the impression that the head is too large. Perhaps it's just a matter of my working those shadows so that the limbs look bigger, I'm not sure. I'll have to play with it some tomorrow and see how it looks once I get the limbs looking right.

This is what artists do. Paint, evaluate, make adjustments, and paint some more. Most of the time this process is repeated multiple times per painting until the painting is just right. The trick is to know when to stop. I think, now that I have been painting this way since January of 2009, that I am getting pretty good at figuring out when to stop. I think in the early paintings I probably stopped too soon. Looking back at the first figurative paintings I did in this series, I can see a huge difference in skills. fabrics didn't flow as well, body parts looked incomplete. I didn't know when to stop working on my paintings and some look like they could have used more work, a lot more work on others. But as I paint more, and improve my skills, my paintings become tighter. I can't wait to see what they will look like a year from now!