Painting portraits and memorized scenes - always so dark?

[Korva]

I'm trying out different skills at the moment, and have rather fallen in love with Painting since it can make some really lovely paintings for home decoration. What bugs me, though, is that I'm having a bit of a hard time getting decent-looking custom paintings, i.e. portraits and paintings done with the memorize scene option. They always look much darker, sometimes so much so that the painting is little more than a mess of 1-3 shades of near-black. Is that normal? Is there a way to get it to look better? Even starting it while all lights are on in the room and there's more light streaming through full-length windows doesn't seem to help much, though the odds of getting a "mess of near-black" seem higher at night.

[Pam]

Try painting your portraits outside during the day.  That works pretty good for me.

[Korva]

Thanks, doing it outside instead of inside did indeed make it a bit brighter still -- should've thought to try that first, before asking.  The paintings still end up noticeably darker than the in-game scene, though -- I guess it's just a feature I'll learn to live with.

[loveSims]

You can put a wall light behind the esel. But the esel must be against a wall. That helped for me.

[folcon]

Your sim's traits might also be a reason for them being so dark.

[Lilygirl]

I like to place a couple of the outdoor lights on the ground pointing up at the place my Sims stand for their portraits. It works really well for indoor portraits.

[Korva]

I'll try the outdoor lights trick, cheers. Traits shouldn't figure into it, looking at what the guide says about them (the only applicable one is Artistic).

[Ricalynn]

Traits wont effect painting portraits but memorizing scenes there is a possibility that traits might effect them.  There are traits that effect the way a painting comes out.  There is a whole thread about this here.