Keen interest and passion.

The desire to begin with this digital portrait however, was purely out of my keen interest, in exploring the effects of Impasto Brushes I had newly installed in Photoshop back then. As for Experimentation has always been an integral part of our life being an artist. I set the approach of Painting A Likeness an ultimate goal in this round of my self-initiated portrait. I was indeed thinking at the same time to also adopt the mode of Impressionist, and perhaps with combined of the Chiaroscuro or abstract treatment to fulfil my personal expression.

I had first established a numbers of visual appearances in my mind's eye, with different sets of hues attained from my digital palette. When I have one rather definite visual conceived, I intuitively found it the Triad Colour Scheme would best suit the likeness I would love to accomplish with my reference portrait. As it may noticeably reflect in this piece of work, the sets of colour I employed was adjusted at its lower intensity, mostly muted but with aims to foster a spatial relationship, and perhaps a mild emotional responses as well among its viewers.

The process of this sort of portraiture paintings are unlike literature, drama, and music, which present their effects successively, judgement are commonly performed as whole and all at once. I had personally injected in this practice of mine with an equal consideration placed on design criteria. The use of Contrast and Harmony, Dominance, Unity, Repetition (resemblance), Alternation, gradation, and Balance in particular, had eased my deliberate judgements along the process of this rendering and design production. Also, such a gesture to work with good practices ensures the conformity and establishment of necessary irregularity in my creation. While some artists design intuitively without visual planning, most will benefit from the use of these criteria during execution and when beholding finished works.

I was taught greatly through this experimentation, that among those many types of underpainting, such as Veneda, Verdaccio, Morellone and Grisaille, multi-colour underpainting was found to be more useful than the often monochromatic when comes to defining the oveall colour values for this particular creation of mine. Many artists would agree that it is not easy to capture the intimate likeness of a portrait, my sentiment is that the mentioned skills and talent it takes to be successful must developed over time, and with keen passions, genuine efforts and commitments that ought to be conceited. The overall challenge faced this round is all part of the fun and I do hope this may interest beginner art enthusiasts as well. With any other subject the margins for error are far greater than for the portrait alone.