Portraits of Neighbor Girls #1

Summertime and, I suppose, pregnancy, have caused me to work a little slower on these latest portraits for which I've been commissioned. Its hard to justify not taking the kids outside for too many days in a row! But these two girls have some very cute photos for me to work with.

This portrait is 11x14, so again I am taking photos of the drawing rather than using the scanner, resulting in varied color results. Can you tell which side the window was on when I took this picture?


One thing I love about the reference photos is they were taken outside...so much more interesting than a plain color background. Plus, the photos were obviously taken with a nice camera, as the background is perfectly out of focus, and the girls stand out from the scenery well, even though the grass matches their hair very closely.
The photographer obviously softened and otherwise manipulated her work in photoshop, which looks great for the photos, but makes it slightly more difficult to get accurate colors and details in the faces. It shouldn't be a problem though.




In the photos, the picture is much farther away and I zoomed in so it was more of a facial portrait. The only issue this caused is there aren't as many visual clues to show that she is standing in grass, as the focused pieces in the foreground would be out of this frame. Hopefully, you can still tell what kind of setting she is in.



Probably the most difficult part of this drawing isn't the grass - which is fun- but the polka-dot dress, which is cute but tedious and took forever! Seriously, this part of the dress that is finished below already took twice as much time as the rest that is done. As this is the bigger paper again, it has more texture, which as I've mentioned makes it harder to do small details accurately. Needless to say, the dress definitely counts as 'small details'! I colored the white dots first, because otherwise they were getting too much red mixed in and looked pink. The red part took three different pencils to get the right color of red, along with purple, blue, brown and orange in the mix.




For some reason the previous photo has more accurate colors from the drawing, even though I fixed this one the same way in photoshop. So picture the colors from that one above on this lower one (warmer and more yellowish). I spent a few days finishing the dress and adding all the layers, then finished off the other white sleeve. I spent a final day or so adding more detail to the background and working on the face, trying to make it look more like the subject.
Again, the original photo was softened so some of the facial details weren't obvious for me to see in my reference picture. This girl still lives by me too, but has a different haircut and is older now than in the photo. You'd think it would help, but it actually made it more difficult trying to reconcile the photo with what I know she looks like in life.




So this is the final drawing for now, but you may see an amended post if it turns out I need to work on it some more! For now, I need to start on the drawing of her sister... before I have the baby next month!