Well no, what you are looking at here is the palette system for skin tones (previous post) put into pratice. You can attempt to paint a portrait without any kind of system but it helps a lot to pre mix the palette like this because it tells you exactly what value should be placed on any given plane of the head.
I felt that I had painted the first sphere too yellow with too high a saturation/ chroma. So I decided to go and look at some paintings both in a gallery and online. Now I'm not saying online portraits have accurate colours, they don't but as an exercise I felt it was quite useful- just to get an idea. I picked portraits from a few different artists and analysed the colours and values. I am sure some of the values on these are wrong but it did show me that I was closer than I thought, especially on the Sargent painting.
Sphere 3 is meant to to be closer to the De Laszlo portrait colours. I did this one slightly differently by painting an underlayer in white first. I wasn't really trying to do a Grisaille, I had found with the first sphere it was difficult to paint the lighter value colors without the dark canvas showing through.
Half way through painting I struggled to get close to his choice of colours which tells me that he might be using a different red and maybe yellow- I couldn't get the bright orange you can see just before the face goes into shadow. There's a lost edge on this sphere too as it goes into shadow, which I think really helps it look three dimensional. Next up is some rough small portrait copies I think.
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