Finally finished a portrait!!!

May 1, 2017 Hazel Scott

Portraits used to be way, waaayyyyy down on my list of art goals. I tried it once, about 17 years ago, by attempting Russell Crowe's face from a VCD cover of Gladiator.

I know, don't judge.

As you may have guessed, that didn't go too well. So yeah, that was the reason I told myself portraits aren't my cup of tea.

In a surprising turn of events (!), that has changed by A LOT in the last few months! I went back to making art last year, aspiring to paint florals and food illustrations, very timid goals, you know, just trying things out.. So it was such a pleasant surprise that making the effort to find artist communities in Cebu has led me to friendships with such amazingly talented people as Dr. Nanette Nacorda-Catigbe. Classes and casual hangouts with doc Nanette has opened my eyes to the possibility of *gasp* doing portraits!

After 'wasting' paper and pastel pencils on a couple of practice pieces, I braved the piece I share here. While the active time on this piece probably totals to less than 5 hours, doing this took me a few days overall. I had to pause a lot, sleep on it, get over the self-doubt and all the mental drama that no one would rather talk about but more than likely goes on behind many an artwork.

The drawing phase is extremely important and what rattled me the most. Any realistic piece needs a strong drawing as its foundation, and I pulled every trick I knew out of the drawing bag of tricks. I did about 80% of the drawing stage with my reference and piece turned upside down, hoping this would help me "draw what I see, not what I know". Seems to work, definitely doing again!

Final drawing

After the initial drawing, I applied the green foundation, which we learned from the amazing tutorial PDFs by Cuong Nguyen. This technique is derived from the concept of verdaccio, a technique that has been in use by oil painters for centuries, but is less commonly applied in pastel drawing. Nguyen seems to apply this to even his watercolor paintings - look it up, it's pretty amazing :)