I had made good progress during my work based on the reference photograph, but I decided it wasn’t good enough.  As a way to visualize changes that might improve the painting, I decided to do a mark-up on the iPad, using a side-by-side comparison with the reference photo.

markup of painted portrait, as a result of side-by-side comparison with photo. iPad screenshot.

I cropped the photo included in my September 8th post and imported it digitally into the ArtRage app on my iPad.  I then ‘painted’ over the portrait area, trying to remedy the problems I identified in the painting.  This was a freehand process, done by ‘eyeballing’ the photo reference.  ArtRage is not able to make measurements for a closer comparison of the two images.

I like this markup as well as the final painting — if not more!  The ability to easily edit iPad marks liberates me from feeling that each (potentially incorrect) modification is ‘permanent’.  Playing around with the marks often yields spontaneous and interesting ideas that I would never have attempted initially in oils.

Even though I liked the resulting mark-up, I knew it would still be a challenge to implement these ideas in oil paint on the actual painting.