My dad asked me to do this one from a photograph he likes a lot.

yup...... thats my nephew again
Cant help it, i miss the guy...we have a blast together at home! the dudes really photogenic too




theres distortion in the last snap
at first i could not capture the faint smile on his face ( its a mona-lisaish kind of smile, a fleeting moment before the actual smile)
Nyway he ended up looking as if he was going to cry(nephew)

worked it, reworked it, kept going until i got his expression down. found an amazing link to do with the different muscles on the face which cause our expressions. figured out the main problem with the face were
1. his lips were turned downward. straightened them and added a tiny indentation at the corners indicating that the cheeks are going be pulled upward. took a while to get this just right, to avoid the clown-smile effect.
2. the most effective change however was in the right eyebrow(his left). found this link http://face-and-emotion.com/dataface/expression/corrugator.html. check it out, this was a total eureka moment. Its to do with a muscle called the corrugator(als called the "angry" muscle) check the clip on the link out. sort of clears up what im talking about. i proceeded to straighten his eyebrow more
3. The left (his right) jowl was droopy. made it more taut ie just about to tuck up into the cheek as the smile develops.

4. The right eye (his left) was looking to the side more than my reference. This made the bottom eye lid look too round. (normall we expect to see roundness where the pupil is.) When one smiles, the bottom eye lid straightens. so i moved the pupil over a bit and voila the bottom lid immediately looked straighter.
Also, when one smiles a small puffed out area forms under the eye lid. I had it there but it lacked emphasis.

took me quite a while to figure it all out,(where i could just as easily have used the underpainting as it was) but i did(think i can write a book on the subject now :-)) and am pretty pleased with myself Needless to say this stuffs going to be a great help for future paintings

this stint with art is one of those extremely rare phases in my life in which im actually really applying myself...which is something i never came close to doing in college. I never really got involved enough in architecture, causing me to, very easily, lose complete interest in the field towards the end of my time in SPA,Delhi

Other than the above i detailed a few other areas. I dont have a photograph of the finished grissaille but will post it as soon as i get my camera back(tj borrowed it for his trip to kanyakumari)
on the specifics: the paintings 20"x30" and i again used raw umber and ivory black added with white as required to get the various tones. a total of about 10-12 hours of work(not in a row:-)) and a shitload of reading up
will post better snaps soon enough