Friday, November 18, 2011

Pastel Portrait!


This one is a small commission for a couple friends of mine who work in the theme park.  Photo was slightly tricky with a few spots but for the most part it was pretty straightforward with the exception of one important element.  They wanted it in PASTEL.  The last time I used pastels was in college my first year of it, so you can imagine how it felt to pick them up again to produce a work of art with them.  Even more so when I consider that the last thing I did with pastels wasn't anything even remotely close to as complex as this nor was it as small scale (it was 20 x 30 IIRC as opposed to 11 x 14). 

The initial pencil sketch in of this was fine, but admittedly the pastel portion of this was a little scary initially.  This isn't like digital work, where the only real fear is a power outage or your system deciding to FORMAT: C:/ since otherwise you have an undo command for anything that might happen.  Here if something goes wrong it could either mean living with it or starting over if it's too big an issue. Granted, one has to get over it and dive on in as results and experience don't come on their own.  You have to make the move.  Now some initial mistakes with the medium were made, and there are things I've definitely do a bit differently on another piece like it (especially in the planning),  but overall I like how it came out.  It's a bit looser than what I'm accustomed to, yet at the same time that's what makes it interesting to me.  It works out kinda like the paintings you see on a wall where it all comes together the farther away you look at it, which is fine as it's going to be in their home on the wall as a show piece as opposed to an online JPEG file that you're looking at on your monitor.  I may touch up a few areas before I deliver it to them, but aside from that I think I'm going to call this one done.

This was done with charcoal pencil and soft pastel on 11 x 17 textured paper cut down to 11 x 14.

Picture updated as of 12/2/2011 to show more accurate color.

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