I rarely feel that I do anything well enough. Portraits are certainly no exception. So, I decided to use some of my leftover pastels from the madonnara (street painting in Italy) work that I described to you a couple of times ago and work to improve my skills – with faces and with color.
Pictured here is a pastel sketch that I did of a beauty named Maria. The drawing is about 40 x 25 cm. The first night that I applied color to my pencil sketch on the dark grey paper, I was only equipped with a small box of “earthtone” pastels. This meant lots of the orange family – from yellow to brown.
The work-in-progress image of my drawing is rather brutta (ugly). High contrast, garish colors, and no blending of tones. More typical of the “note-taking” that I do while I have the model in front of me.
I was thinking that the final work looked not as good as I expected of myself – until I came home, looked at the other images, and saw my actual progress. That said, I did learn that generally speaking, it is the lights that should have the chroma (color) in them, while the darks play it down, in the same manner that a backup singer supports and allows the star to take the stage.
Had I started with a larger box of pastels, with a broader range of pigments, I might have done this correctly. As it was, I first started using my pinks and cooler colors to tone down the large oranges of the lights. I did later work in the dark areas, but perhaps they still have more color than the light areas.
Maria’s hair was blue and red, but I think I was lost on how to handle this. I did enjoy adding the blue (first) to the black (compressed charcoal) – reminiscent of the comic book Wonder Woman. Ha ha.
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