Day 2 painting a portrait - Introducing colors!

Hello and good day to you all!

Today I finally had some time to continue on my portrait painting that I started a few days ago!

Portrait after todays session of laying in first layer of color compared to how it looked with just underpainting.
If you want to read the previous post about the first phase of underpainting, here's a link;
https://steemit.com/art/@mayasky/a-step-by-step-photo-shoot-of-how-i-make-my-underpaintings

This portrait is turning out to be a lot of fun and I definitly think working with other mediums during the past year has helped me develpe in aspects of my oil paintings as well.

Today as last time I took a lot of photos documenting my process of how I went about things.
Here they are with some descriptions and thoughts of what was going on in my head as I was painting.

Ok, so before I start with the process photos I wanted to introduce you to, my palette!
She is not looking too fresh these days as I am the worst at letting old paint dry up and pretty much never clean her, but hey, she works!

Here you have my pre mixed skintones that I made from; Golden ochre, Ivory black, Titanium white, Paynes Grey and Brilliant red.

I mix them from dark to light and also have some additional mixes to the right of the palett for the eyes.

So let's go;

The first thing I do is ude mixture nr.9 from the top to drybrush a thin layer over more or less the whole face and neck. This I do to get a midtone value to relate my other values to and to have a foundation to build form from.

After that I go in with a thin brush and fish out some of the darker areas. I am not painting with my darkest value yet, but using the second darkest for now. This just gives me the oppertunity to go darker if needed.

Next step is adding in some half tones. For now I keep them quite flat. My models skin has a pinkish tone with cool halftones and shadows. She has a lot of urple in her skin as well as blues.
Because my underpainting was a bit too warm the colors that I put on her face at this point might seem too cold or almost like a mask, don't worry, it will get better!

I keep on adding the cooler purple in her shadow shapes and also start softening the edges of my half tones to get more of a sense of form. This stage is often reffered to as The ugly stage. It's before things click and everything just looks a bit patchy and dirty, luckily, it will pass..

At this point I have started to introduce some pinkier fleshtones to bring more color and warmth to her face. Especially in the cheeks and nose.

I now start working more with the features. I put in the lips, the eyebrows and model the form on her nose a bit more. I also continue to soften the halftones and connect them more to the form. In the process of doing this I am also introducing more light to strengthen the form. The forehead, nose, chin, and cheeks all have been painted with some of the lighter values on my palette.

I am still painting quite thinly and will keep on doing so throughout this initial layer of color. I am starting to get more a feel for how the values work together at this point and see that some shadows can be darkened. You might think that she looks very pale and that I don't have a lot of wiggle room when it comes to adding lighter values, but I still can push the light quite a bit. When I made my flesh tone mixtures I added a generous bit of color to my lighter values.

The last thing I do is add in the eyes. And I know, they do NOT look right yet, hehe. But hopefully they will soon! I could have kept going for hours more on this painting today, but the sun went down and with it my light, so hopefully I will be able to continue this one tomorrow!

What do you think of the painting so far?

I am having a lot of fun and can't wait to paint some more! :)

Hope you are all having an amazing and creative day!

<3