My daughter is a good subject for me to make portraits from. Firstly, I know the contours of her face very well, this though mustn’t inform my drawing more than what I see in the photo.
When drawing with a photo as reference rather than a life model make certain that your photo is good quality and depicts light and shadows well. A portrait without them will look naïve, which is fine if that’s what you were going for but with this study it wasn’t.
So here’s my starting photo:
This photo is one of a series I took of her in London. I wanted a geometric background for other studies. The light was great, it was Summer and my daughter was allowing me to pap her for once!
Ok, so I started with a quick sketch to get the basic shapes in :
Then I started getting the light and dark areas defined. As I worked on the head I realised her body was too small so I corrected that then slowly I lost her likeness in losing site of the whole look and concentrating too much on details.
Then I brought her back and for some reason decided to give her a green turban. I don’t know why, I just felt tired of painting long tresses of hair. They never give the subject a contemporary feeling and I think pastels really lend themselves to a dated feel which I don’t want in my own renderings so I thought a green head scarf and sports top went well together and gave a younger more contemporary feel to the image plus green is my favourite colour 🥰
Finally, after spending a couple of days fannying around with this work I’d had enough and sprayed it finished so I couldn’t keep from compulsively changing it!
So here she is.
I’m pretty ok with it but in my next pastel I’ll not be using black or grey for the shadow work so you can see the difference that makes. It’ll have a less graphic edge.
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