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A friend recently posted a photo of her granddaughter, and I was so taken by the simple beauty and serenity of the image that I asked permission to create a painting from it. It was harder to achieve that beauty and serenity than I thought it would be.

After blocking in the initial underpainting, I realized the skin tones were inaccurate. I struggled to make them right, and finally came up with a plan that seemed to work for me. In Photoshop, I isolated portions of the face and filled blocks with the individual colors that were isolated. By opening each of these separately, I was able to mix a variety of colors on my palette to match the color blocks. The image below shows the colors that were isolated from various parts of her face. It was an interesting exercise. The next image shows my palette with the color mixes. You can see where some of the tones actually look lavender. (Some of the lavender shown mixed on my palette was used for painting her pants.)