Trying to paint a portrait of Dianna Cowern, part 1

Today I tried to paint a portrait of Dianna Cowern from a photo I found on the Internet. I hope I may use it... Anyhow the idea is that I paint a picture of Dianna as good as I can, and then I put my painting next to the original photo, or even better below the original slightly half transparent to see what went wrong.

The added complexity here is that she has a big smile and I am not so good at painting big smiles.

I measured the width of her eyes and found that this width was equal to the height from her glabella down to the lower lip of her mouth. She got one eye distance between her eyes. All these things went well. When more features of her face had found its place, there are more things to use to compare with while measuring. For example, from her inner eye hook, one eye width down reach the middle of her nose wings.

So what did I miss?

I missed her forehead! She got a bigger forehead in reality. I made her jaws very big. Especially on the right side. In the real image, she got a much slender jaw.

I found that making a photo from below exaggerates the mistake I made enormously. So I entertained myself with that.

To make the comparison I opened both my image and the original and resized them so they had the same size. You can see the silhouette of the real Dianna as darker lines in the comparison image.

I nailed the tilt of the head. It was not necessary to rotate the images.

Here is how I created the comparison image: I placed the original in a layer on top a layer of my painting in GIMP, and selected the edge-detect filter of the original Dianna. Then I inverted the edge detected image. Then I made that partly transparent.

Dianna is a famous YouTuber working on spreading the enthusiasm for science, especially for young kids. She is a really inspiring person!

Next time my painting will be much better. That will be part 2.