Last night I started going through photos for the next painting, taking time away from the problematic current piece. Today, I bounced between designing ideas, and re-looking at that one in hopes of finding a clue to its ‘wrongness’. I finally found that one of the biggest problems was the eyes and mouth, which I had painted days ago. They were distorted and not in proper proportions. I repainted them, and that helped quite a bit, but the overall face was still ugly. Trying to add more and more oil pastels on top only makes it worse, the colors all blending into a very dull, awful gray (and despite this skin needing to be gray-ish, this was not a good thing). So, in order to get it right, I scraped the face and neck back down to the board. Once cleaned off, I re-applied the textured gesso to the area, and now await it drying before getting this piece finished. Hopefully this time I’ll get the right colors going and make it look the way I want it.
Until then, I’ll go back to designing, juggling a few ideas to see which hits me to be the next painting.