I told my nephew and niece-to-be that I'd love to paint a portrait of them in honor of their upcoming wedding, and here it is. Thank you to Alison for the lovely reference photo. The reference photo was in a dark venue--perhaps a concert or something like that? Everything was gray or black or brown except their faces, so I decided to lean into that for the portrait.
His black t-shirt had a reddish undertone on the right and got a darker, cooler black toward the left, where it was more in shadow. The lettering on his shirt was white, but I made it gray so that it didn't stand out as much and compete with their faces. I also made the gray lettering slightly greenish to complement the reddish aspect of his shirt. I took a workshop from the wonderful painter Erin Raedeke on color and light, and she often pushed adjacent shapes into more of a complementary color relationship, which I thought was really interesting. So here I did that as a choice with the red-green relationship. Yay to me for making artistic choices!
You can see some in-between process photos below. The last photo was taken with my scanner, which shows a truer color than the others, which I took with my iPhone. This is 9x12" oil paint on mdf panel.
