[faB]

Hello

I copied one of John Singer Sargent's paintings ("Mrs Charles E. Inches") to practice my perception of values before I try some grayscale still lifes.

My goal was NOT to copy his style or textures or even to get an exact copy in terms of detail but instead to get the main values right.

That's how I painted it in PS (chalk brush, 65% opacity):



The head seems a bit off, looks better at a larger scale:



I'm not very happy with the mouth, and the robe. I'm not sure what fabric the robe is (velvet?) and I'm not quite sure where the light sources is/are. The robe in my copy seems flat.

It's not finished, I'm hoping you guys can point out the main spots where I got my values wrong and I'll spend another 1-2 hours tomorrow before I move on to another grayscale study.

Thanks

PS: any tips on how to correctly estimate value from colours (without the colour picker ) ? One problem I find is that warm colours tend to look brighter than they are.
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"I'm not a shrimp, I'm a KING PRAWN !" -- Pepe.
selfportraits & stuff

[m00ftak]

I think you did an amazing job. The values seem to match flawlessly on the entire work.

You said you were unhappy with the way the mouth turned out? I personally like yours more than Sargents

[Wagner]

yea, i think the values pretty much match.

I think the only difference is the overall emotion of it, and that's just becuase of the brush strokes and the colors. I think you did great.
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I just realised that my screen name is Wagner, but my last name is Wagner, I'm not making any references to anyone.

[faB]

Thanks for the comments, guys.

This was actually the last version:



I used more subtle gradations on the arms and chest, use slightly darker tones on the arms, the face was very slightly darkened, and the neck line was made a little better..

When finished I sampled colors to check for brightness and the original has: chest overal slightly brighter (~5%), the leftmost cheek is brighter ~5%, the robe is overall 5-10% darker, forearms rounded part ~5-8% brighter (as a result of darkening them too much from the earlier image). And I messed up the 'knot'.

Just checked the lips, and the reason why I didnt like them is because they didnt come out as round as the original. The reason is on the lower lip you have a value transition of ~70 to 55%, in my pic the values are 65-52%.

I guess that taught me a lesson : if you squint to get the overall values, smaller darker shapes are 'eaten' by the surrounding brighter values, and vice-versa.

Those smaller shapes with darker or lighter accent can really add to the form I think. I hope I didnt say something stupid. But I've started to noticed this more and more as I am working on another grayscale study. I'm trying to get the main shapes value early on, and I dont get the same light quality, but maybe it s me putting wrong values instead of small dark/light accents missing.. still investigating.

Wagner: true, I think also it comes from her face

mooftak: maybe it's just me but she seems to have a cheeky almost-hidden smile in there, or maybe it's the eyes, but I guess copying from the image alone makes it harder to capture it
_________________
"I'm not a shrimp, I'm a KING PRAWN !" -- Pepe.
selfportraits & stuff