White on Black Portrait Art

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

In keeping with this month’s anniversary celebration and my sale on portraits, I wanted to share with you this portrait drawing I created back in November from a live model.

I have been using charcoal drawings to learn more about subtlety in tones. Anyone who knows me knows that expressing subtlety is a challenge for me. I did many drawings with only charcoal on paper. In recent months I began to draw on a non-white paper and then add white pastel to push up the contrast of my images a bit.

This naturally led to my trying to create subtle changes in tone with only the white pastel on the paper, because if the white pastel and the black charcoal mix, one gets mud -- or a bluish white. Normally, I hate the tool called “the stomp,” but when I want to push my Rembrandt pastel into the paper I am using, nothing beats the stomp. A stomp is basically a very tightly rolled paper about the size of a short pencil that has both ends sharpened to a point. I also use this tool, plus various erasers to create a variety of whites.


In this portrait drawing of my friend and fellow artist Dana, I used only white pastels on a black Canson Mi-Teintes paper they label as “Luxurious paper with subtle texture.”
If I literally only drew what I considered to be the lights, the face would appear to float in all of this black, perhaps a bit like the Phantom of the Opera. And Dana has dark hair. So I chose to imply some hair and a neck.

This look is certainly different from others I have tried, but I am loving the exploration and what I am learning about form from these types of portrait drawings. I hope you find this portrait “Dana” of interest. She is available, too. How about that?

“Dana 2008”
original portrait drawing
by Kelly Borsheim
black textured Mi-Teintes paper
with white pastels
16 x 12 inches
$150 + $20 shipping (anywhere)