pastel portrait

I have been working on a pastel portrait and thought I would share what I have already. It is pretty much done. I will go back and tweek here and there. Anyway I decided to use pastel for this portrait since the reference photo was alittle blurry. I had no access to another so we thought pastel would work out fine. This one is pretty straight forward, reference photo taken with a flash... tried to keep it soft. Oh and we had to keep it small 8x10 so that I didn't have to make up detail that I couldn't see.

Update---- The finished portrait after alittle tweaking...

Oh, and now I see one more thing to do....

Mr Personality!

I just finished this 8x10 in watercolor. This portrait just had to be done with a bold background to fit the big, bold, in your face personality of this pint sized dog.

Faces

So for my last tuesday class, we finished the vintage portrait lesson working on a portrait using the smaller studies and paintings we did. Remember to use the contour drawings, value studies and painted sketches to keep the lights and darks in the proper places. The rest is just coloring! The painting is about 8x11 inches on watercolor paper.

I also included a watercolor sketch I did of my son. He is working on his portfolio for school and left a photo reference of himself, lit from underneath, at my studio. He is pretty creative and it inspired a future class to do with my students... If you take away the familiar, you are forced to look at and draw what you see, not what you think you see. Kind of like drawing upside down... This is also about 8x10 inches.