Naptime
pastel on Canson Mi-teintes paper
12" X 16"
original photo
For me one of the hardest things to do are portraits and yet I love doing them. Portraiture is a perpetual challenge. It is more than just capturing the face, the colour and the shape but the capturing of the human spirit of the individual. I find children particularly challenging. Sometimes i tend to age the children although that is certainly not what I intend to do. In all portraits I start out by putting as much detail to the eye after rendering the beginning base of skin tones. I do this before I attempt to any of the other features in any detail. Part of the trick to rendering children is the recreation of the dewiness of their skin for lack of a better explanation. Highlights and lowlights are very important and sometimes I feel like I fall short when it comes to rendering the darkest values in depicting children. For me the fear is always making the child look harsh. As you can see from the photo there is a lot of red tones to the hair. while rendering a portrait it is important to either know or at least to have seen various photos of a person under various light sources to more accurately determine colouration. In this case the baby actually had blondish hair while his brother had the lightest brown hair with golden highlights.
Note: It has been quite a while since I have evaluated this piece and I know realize that the baby's face was longer and heavier. Wow there is always something to be learned and nothing is ever perfect.
You truly are a fantastic artist Christine! It's true what you say, sometimes you need to walk away for a while and come back to it with a set of fresh eyes!
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