I used a Hahnemühle non-sanded pastel paper from my sampler set to draw the pair of ornaments taken from my fireplace decorations.
I took a photo of the entire easel scene; you can see the reference objects on the left. I also took a photo of the ornaments, and the color palette I used.
I was painting from life rather than the photo reference; the photo looks somewhat bluer and I was standing at a slightly different position taking the photo than when I was actually pasteling.
This drawing — done in graphite, compressed charcoal, and white Conte crayon — was based on a photograph from Pixabay, which I cropped and changed to grayscale.
Original image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay
Today I did my own landscape painting based on a photo of a sunrise I took several years ago in our backyard.
I used Clairefontaine Ingres paper, which is unsanded, and not too bad. It was a pale tan color (and part of my unsanded paper sample I purchased from Jackson’s Art a year ago.) The initial drawing was done in vine charcoal. And I kept the size to 8×6.
So, I ended up painting the rest of the pastel board with acrylic paint (Golden’s Fluid Acrylics in the yellow ochre color).
What was interesting is that the performance of the pastel sticks changed. Great America, NuPastel, Blick and Blue Earth skipped all over, and pigment was just falling off the painted paper! On the other hand, the Richeson Hand-Rolled and Sennelier seemed to grip the painted surface acceptably.
So, what have I learned?
This portrait is based on a photo I downloaded from Pixabay. I used soft vine charcoal for the large shaded areas, For the more detailed areas, I used charcoal pencils 2B and 6B, in addition to Conte crayon in light gray, with mere touches of Conte in white. The rendering was done on Strathmore 400 gray toned sketch paper.
Here’s another portrait study from an Unsplash photo. Again, shading is a major issue. I also don’t have the shape of the subject’s chin and cheeks quite correct. The mouth is fairly decent, but not shaded dark enough.
Here’s my attempt at another portrait. I need much more experience in properly toning and shading darker skin. While I did some shading on the subject’s neck, the shading on her right and left cheeks is entirely absent, and around the bridge of her nose is much lighter than the reference.
I could say the same regarding the white shirt.
Based on a photo from Clarke Sanders on Unsplash.
Here’s a portrait I did from a photo reference in an ArtTutor class.
BetterLateThanNeverArt 