Light & Shadow

I have begun the process of finding the darks and lights.  The thing that gives me the most trouble in painting is finding the darks.  I am self taught and so I picked up some pretty crippling habits in the process of learning to paint.  One was that I was starting my painting by painting the lights first and then I could never get the darks the correct value because my lights were actually mid values.  So now I am retraining myself to find those darks first and then move toward the light.  So, I started with the shadow beneath the nose and in the corner of eye socket.  Placed a near same dark in the hair, established the ear in the shadow and then worked toward the mid values of his face and hair.  I put no real highlights in, they come last, but did establish a very light forehead color. 
Obviously I paint longer and faster than what I am putting on this blog, but for the sake of the space limitations here, I am stretching out my posts.  These two photos represent about a four hour stretch in the studio minus some tea breaks and to stretch my back.

 I also began to lay in the dark black jacket he is wearing which helps me to really see just how dark his facial shadows and darks really are. As you can see, there is no way the shadows in his face or the iris of his eye, is as dark as his jacket.  I have used a very dark greyed blue for his eyes, but not nearly as dark as his jacket.