Wednesday 9 January 2008

A self portrait

self portrait in soft pastels Jan 2008
I made time to draw this today. I need to make time for my art. More about that later.
This is not a flattering portrait, but I'm keeping it, and showing it to you. It was interesting separating my face into tones, and keeping the brown paper colour, only touching up where I had to with a reddy-brown pastel where I'd gone too wrong. I chose a dark blue for the darks, as the black was just too dark.
Then, because I was frowning as I concentrated, I noticed my wrinkled forehead, so decided to add that. As I said, it's not a flattering portrait; my hair is thin, my skin bloated and wrinkled. But I'm trying to get beyond only showing the beauty, the 'nice', and instead want to include the imperfections. I hope to strike a balance eventually, but for now I'm swinging to the extreme. Watch this space, if you have the stomach for it.

2 comments:

Gerald de Dios said...

I love and admire your continued "PUSH" you've been applying to your charcoal drawings. I really like the minimal added colors on the latest illustration. I think it's just enough and still shows emotion & character.

I tend to use both hands when using pastels/charcoal too. It's messy...so why not get all 10 fingers messy? Keep at it, and I'll definitely will visit your blog again. Cheers!

Yellow said...

Thanks Gerald. I'm going to stay with this subject for a while I think, and see where it takes me.
I love the way I can 'get stuck in' to pastels, move them around, work over the top of them, add a flick here and there.... I want to work bigger sometime soon and I fancy using soft pastels and a heavy watercolour paper with some 'teeth'. Keep visiting and PLEASE leave comments. I'm sure I can learn a lot from you.

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