[QUOTE=Garth Herrick]Hi Barbara,
I can see you have done quite a lot on this painting and it does look much better. I don't like your new brown background which is effectively competing as a foreground against your portrait subjects. The background brown is more strident and chromatically intense than any brown in either of the two kids. For example, the boy's brown stripe shirt should not appear to recede behind the background. I would kill the intensity of this brown with a velatura like I have described in the thread on my painting Apotheoun (page 4)
http://forum.portraitartist.com/showthread.php?t=4136. It does not need to be much, a little goes a long way. You just want the background to be more atmospheric in perspective. It can be brown, but it has to be a quality of brown that relates well to everything else.
Hello again Garth,
I looked right through the above thread and yes, it was mentioned in it, but no explanation of what Velatura is. I put my google search engine to work on it and it came up with a lot of sites.........in Italian! The ones that were in English talked about enamel and varnishes which was not much help to me I'm afraid.
Would you be so good as to explain to me what Velatura is? I made a guess after reading your thread that it was maybe a milky scumble, but as my guesses are usually way off the mark I thought that I would check with you.
Thanks again for all your help.
Barbara
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