Pastel Portrait - March 19

Life Drawing- 4/1/09

I can't remember being so satisfied with one session of life drawings.




This last batch is a single page, and I like all the drawings in it, so I scanned it as is. I think that's pretty cool.

Pastel

"Amanda Lee"

I just started taking a new class at the Art Students League. This is the result of day one, and it took about 2 1/2 hours to do.
I think the head's too big. Darn it!

Wedding Portrait for L&A

Here's a pastel wedding portrait for a couple friends (L. and A.) that I've been working on for some time. Now I can safely say is finally finished. It took many many weeks to do.
This is the first time I picked up my pastels in a while. It was a daunting task ahead of me ... until I visited the home of an older lady. On display there was a charcoal self-portrait by her granddaughter, and you could clearly see the Squares she used to resize the image from a photograph. I had always considered that cheating, but hell, the world's best muralists do just that. So with that tool I set out to tackle the double-portrait.
From start to finish it took about 2 months. And that's not counting the time it took to overcome my fear of "can I DO this???" and then "okay, it's not perfect, but it's not bad. I should just quit while I'm ahead." In the end I didn't quit and the result is something I'm pretty content with. Which is indeed saying much.

Life Drawings

Life Drawings this week.
My teacher, Terence Coyle, saw these drawings and said in mild surprise, "Your proportions are very good." He said this a couple times in that 5-minute time frame, recollecting a student who is great with shadow and color but "his heads don't look like they're stuck to the body. He doesn't use a center line and you think that if the figure gets up, the heads will just fall off." I told him I work very had on my proportion, thinking of all the time spent on Posemaniacs.com and on NoseGoblins, my exercise blog.

Happy Holidays!

More Life Drawings