Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Fourth Pastel - Indy Cigarette Girl



Ok, here's my fourth pastel. I worked on it over two nights. It's based on a photo of mine included in the post.
This is one of my better and earlier photos. I'm pretty happy with the photo. I think I did do a little tweaking in photoshop getting rid of some background items and darkening the hair to meld into the background.
As for the pastel painting, I'm satisfied with it, I wouldn't say proud, but satisfied. I did draw it using the smoother side of the canson paper and I think that helped. I used black paper but in retrospect I probably should of used a lighter colour as it would have made her skin tone more fair.
Items I know I could have done better are;
  1. Right eyebrow: The angle is a little off. Erasing that big of a black area would have made a mess.
  2. Eye proportions: the eyes are a little far apart and there's not enough skin between the left eye and the side of her head.
  3. Right side of the face: I couldn't get the contours right.
  4. Right shoulder: Again, not sure how I could of fixed that without making a mess.
  5. Hair ends: I'm not sure how I could of ended the hair better.
  6. Background/Trimming: I copped out and just used black.
One cool thing I learned during this is that brown and blue make a good colour that can be used as a shadow for skin tones.

I'm looking for some real critiques so let me know!

1 comment:

Eli said...

It's admirable that you are trying to get those 50,000 pieces out of the way. My high school art teacher said something similar to the Chuck Jones quote and I really took it to heart. This pastel actually has a nice quality to it! Don't get to hung up on perfection, drawing with heart can take one far, sometimes I try to add imperfections because otherwise things get boring...