Past Portrait

I have been busy so far this week and no chance to start a new project. However, the well of ideas are not far off. I have a list of ideas I want to try! So, in the meantime, I'll look into my harddrive to post something. Here is a portrait that I did over three years ago. I was taking a portrait class where we worked from live models. This class was taught by G. Nicholaides, the son of Kimon Nicholaides who wrote the book "The Natural Way to Draw". After taking this class a few times I noticed a marked improvement in my portraits. He would begin the session with several fast full figure sketches on newsprint ranging from five minutes to thirty seconds. It might seem strange to do that at the beginning of a portrait class, but I found that it helped me to warm up and be in the "groove" by the time we started working on the portrait. Then, we would work the remainder of the morning on the models upper torso and face with a critique at the end. The models would often wear costumes or have props. On this model I struggled with the angle of her face, but I did well with the hands and the reflective light was fun to do.
I did this piece in pastels 18x24 on brown wrapping paper. I really took to pastels, because you could draw or "paint" with them allowing for a lot of freedom in how you approach a subject. What put a stop to that was the cost of building and maintaining a decent palette of colors, cost of good paper, and the necessity of framing each piece to preserve it. Oils are not cheap either, but I can mix thoroughly giving me more colors out of fewer pigments and canvases can wait to be framed. Regardless, it was my introduction to color before I took up oils and made the transition to paint quite easy.