Window to the soul

When I first saw the reference photo for this portait I did below, I knew I had to paint her, even though portraits are way out of my comfort zone. But I have learnt not to ignore irrational prompts as hey have frequently led to some of my more inspired creations.

This is one of them.

I titled this piece "Bare" instead of the more obvious "Hidden" because what struck me about this image was that even though she was veiled and partly in shadow, you simply cannot NOT look at her. She has an expression that seizes you from the gut. I couldn't look away. And at the risk of sounding pretentious, I feel it represents many women who may be covered or hidden away, yet their presence radiates a mile wide.

When there is light within, nothing can conceal it.

This was using pastel pencils on black Canson Mi-teintes. Painting flesh tones with pastel pencils is tricky because you can't mix colours with pastels and I don't have the right shades. So it was a lot of light layers of burnt orange, mauve, lavender grey and chocolate, hoping they somehow blend to form flesh.

This second piece too struck me when I saw the reference photo. I've come to the conclusion that I don't like drawing human portraits, but I do love drawing eyes.

I think I can handle human portraits only if I don't need to achieve likeness. This was done using coloured pencils. I decided to keep it monochrome and just add the blue tints, though I managed to sneak in my favourite purple in the brows. 😄