Portraits - Three: new 2wk painting; my nose

Our homework for the week was to paint our noses at 2x life size, looking slightly from the side and underneath. I learned more about the colors and shapes of my nose than I wanted to. The painting needs more darks--I don't know why it's still so hard for me to see those. I thought I was really exaggerating both the high chroma on the bridge and the darkness of the reds, but no. (4x5):

[photo tk]

Our new model is called Rich and he holds his head very still. That is very good news for me--drawing is hard enough already when just I'm trying to copy what I see.

The best thing I did tonight was the 10 minute under-painted sketch in dark brown oil+turpentine. It looked like him! I have no photographic evidence.

The work went a lot faster this week. I got some version of all his features on the canvas and then spent the last hour working on all the colors in his cheek.

It's getting easier to mix the colors I want so I'm able to spend more time painting, less time mixing and remixing. I finally figured out some uncomplicated 'recipes' for skin tones and I've been able to cut down my working palette to just 15 tubes of paint.
What I learned:
1. Get real cadmium red, not cad red hue, because that's the only way you'll get juicy red-orange for noses and cheeks.
2. I'm using some old cad yellow hue for now, but for mixing oranges, it works much better than my other yellows with prettier-sounding names.
3. Yellow ocher + white + whatever else is on the palette makes a good enough yellowy, ivory light skin tone.
4. Make warm and cool pinks and light flesh colors by adding white to couple of earth reds--I'm screwing around with Indian Red for cooler pinks and Terra Rosa for the warmer. I'm trying Venetian Red too. What a blessed relief to arrive in the general ballpark after 15 seconds of mixing instead of 15 minutes. Is this why my teacher didn't give us instructions on using specific pigments on our palettes? So that it would feel like a miracle when we finally figured things out for ourselves? It worked on me. I'm very very very grateful to these colors every time I mix paint now.