New projects - May 2012

Well, today was a pretty good and productive day.  I finished a couple of underpaintings for two new portraits.  This one is a simple (yet very difficult) portrait of a young girl:

The problem is... the portrait is a bit off-centered, and I'm not sure if I should do something with the top right part of the picture.  We'll see.
The second painting is just a fun subject of a tough-looking biker girl.  I hadn't planned on this one until today. 

Right now I have these two projects started, and I would like to get a third and possibly a fourth one going as well.  I find that the more projects I have going at once, the more productive I actually am.  I finally cleaned and organized my studio yesterday too, which also helps with my productivity.  I've set it up so now I have two work stations.  I have my regular easel, and I set up a desk so I can work on drawings and smaller canvases with my table easel.
I also purchased some more paint recently that I am really excited to use.  I've been wanting to broaden my palette, and I'm getting started on these two paintings.  Now my palette will consist of:

titanium white
cadmium yellow
yellow ochre
cadmium orange
cadmium red light
vermilion hue
scarlet lake red
cadmium red deep
indian red
alizarin crimson
sap green
viridian hue
pthalo blue
prussian blue
french ultramarine blue
burnt sienna
burnt umber
raw umber

Each of my paintings will use some variation of this palette, give or take a color or two.  The underpainting for the young girl is exclusively burnt umber, and the biker girl portrait is done with raw umber.  I used to mix up sap green and crimson to create the brown tone for my underpaintings, and that was pretty much the only brown I used for any painting.  So hopefully now that I have some other browns, I will be able to cut back on my usage of sap green and crimson.
Well, that's all for now.  Hopefully I'll have some updates on these two portraits, and some underpaintings for more new projects on my next post.