Portraits - Four: Painting #2 "Rich"

I learned the model's name this time.
His hair is actually black and his lips are very red, but I'm not slick enough to handle all that without making it look like eyebrow liner and lipstick. I wiped it off and made everything light brownish. Cop out.

I spent most of my painting time on the nose and eyes--I didn't get back to finishing a lot of what I'd hoped to do, but the nose really needed the work. Our nose painting homework from last week helped a lot, but I still had trouble figuring out what I was seeing from 20 ft away. At the end of the night, my teacher walked by and said, "there's a dark red line running here 1/4 inch along the inside line of the nose--can you see it?" He scumbled it in for me, and then said, "and there's a light blue line just to the left of the red, along the edge of the nose, and to the other side of the red line, there are about 6 shades of flesh that make the curve of the bridge down to the cheek. Can't you see them on the model?" I stared and stared and stared and I couldn't see anything like he was describing, but then between one blink and the next--I'm either the most suggestible person in the world, or I had been the most oblivious--the colors on his nose transformed into a light blue line edge, followed by a dark red line that hadn't been there a second ago, and then the various light oranges and pinks. Weird. So that's how you paint a nose.