Child Portrait – Molly

I’ve been trying to get to grips with a new paper for skin – not a new paper for me but I’d never successfully used it for skin before.  Sometimes things just click – often the ‘click’ follows a lot of frustration and practice 🙂

So here is the beautiful Molly ( a friends daughter) as a beautiful bridesmaid at a wedding.  She is so beautiful not just in looks in her heart too.

I started with my line drawing which I transferred on to the Velour paper.  You can’t easily rub out on velour so I like to get the drawing right first then transfer it.

I started adding the shadows very lightly to bring out her features, first in a sumptuous pink to match her head band.

Then I gradually built up to the lighter skin tones layering the pastel and belnding with a rubber blender and a cotton wool bud.

She looks like a bit like a porcelain doll here!  I have continued to build on the skin tones so they fill out her features and make her skin come to life.

Here I have added her eyes and they took ages to get right making sure I had lovely crisp edges on her eye colour.

Here I have started her hair and I’ve made it quite dark to start with to build definition.  Her hair is so light and delicate there was a danger of it all becoming cream / blonde and no definition.  The beauty of the Unison Pastels that I use is that they are so vibrant they can add so much light and life to hair.

So here I have added tge Unison Pastels on top of the defined hair and it really does make the curls stand out.  Blonde is quite a difficult colour to captture in a portrait as it reflect so many colours.  I used oranges and peaches to get her hair colour realistic.

You can see the peachy orange colours in her hair here – these are the underlays before I lighten it.