The Dark - painting process and editing

It's amazing. Comparing the Value version with the beginnings of painting over in color, a kind of digital grisaille method I decided to apply to this picture as a means to sharpen some skills, it has become painfully obvious how color changes everything. I had to go in and make adjustments to the image that were fine in the greyscale version but with beginning to place color over and painting over elements the image shifted as it were. Some of the areas effected were proportional relationships and space related areas.

This brings home what Donald W. Graham writes "The importance of color as an independent force in painting developed in the nineteenth century. Methods of relating drawing to color had to be developed, for they had not been exploited by the renaissance painters or, for that matter, by most painters before Cezanne." His point is very insightful, he mentions earlier that color for most renaissance painters was not as important as linear perspective. Actually color had to be subject and bound to the laws of scientific perspective, so one ended up coloring in a grayscale drawing as opposed to painting in color. Now I know that this small little point can potentially open up a debate that could rage on for a while - let me state my intention plainly. I am not a proponent of one school of thought as a opposed to another. Rather I believe in integrating ideas to perfect skills and find truth to work by. Here is how this is relevant to us now. Our approach to a painting, if painting in a representational style of any form is effected by this underlying presupposition whether we understand it or not. As we learn to move from drawing to painting we encounter this problem. Color must be treated as an independent force, we need to be able to adjust color to meet our aims as artists. Even if we go against our 'logic' or what we expect to see in nature. After all, the artist's world is independent from reality in nature even if we are painting representational images.

I wanted a feral like quality to the girl. I'm painting over the image, initially with glaze like layers and increasingly more opaque in others. It has been interesting so far.

Since then... (updated at 11:26)

(updated -having found some time- 10:56 pm)