A new kind of portrait. Sort of.

Okay, so it's still a color pencil portrait. And I've done a wedding picture of a married couple before. But this time...there is a big fancy temple in the drawing! I somehow volunteered to include the structure in the drawing, which, it turns out, was probably not a good idea considering I don't really draw buildings well, what with all the straight, parallel and perfectly perpendicular lines that are required.
And you might say (tongue in cheek) that I can't even draw a straight line with a ruler! Ha hahahaha! Sorry. Private joke.


The building made this drawing much more complicated, time consuming, and frustrating. Yet I suppose we all need to grow, right? I had this vague idea that I would do the temple in some kind of impressionistic manner, so the details wouldn't be as important. But I had no idea how to do that, so it didn't happen.
So the original photo was from much farther away, showing more of the couple's bodies and more of the temple. I wanted to zoom in enough that their faces were still the focus of the drawing, while still showing a good portion of the building in the background. I like this composition alright, but in retrospect, I wish I'd have pushed the people a little closer to the center of the drawing so her bouquet won't be so cut off by the picture frame, rather than worrying about getting the spires behind them!



So I used some carbon paper to mark where all the corners were on the building, as it wouldn't come close to looking right if I did it all freehand. I thought I had checked everything before I started adding in the gray color, but later I realized some of the lines weren't quite right, making some things at wrong angles or positioned wrong etc. Too late to fix now! I was already getting too upset over this, and the faces were barely started!




I feel like I spent more time trying to fix things than I did doing any drawing, which is very sad. I have to admit, I used a couple of dabs of whiteout to fix some of the building details that were driving me crazy...hopefully they aren't noticeable in the final version, and they won't come off! Ugg.


I did like working on their faces; this is the first portrait I've done in a long time where they're not looking straight out at the camera. It was a challenge to get their profiles right (which I hope I did!) but it was more of a fun challenge than a bother.



At this point I was feeling very unhappy with the drawing. The photo was taken in the middle of the day, judging by the bright lights and harsh shadows. I was taking measures to tone down the high contrast (read dark shadows) on their faces, but hadn't done so on the building. This resulted in almost white highlights, and very dark shadows, drawing your attention to the temple rather than the people....which I didn't want, especially because there were so many drawing mistakes in the structure!



I was seriously considering throwing this away and doing a new one with just the people, but I let it sit for a few days, then decided to darken the light parts of the temple instead (and lighten the dark as much as possible), to see if it helped bring the focus back to the couple. It was working! I figured if I made the colors on the people a little brighter, this would also help draw attention away from the building. Can I say I really hate that dark portion right behind their heads? If only I could do that part over....


The flowers are out of focus and vague in the photo, so I didn't want to add details that aren't there, but I wish they popped a little more. So, in retrospect, I could've said I was done much sooner, because here at least, the last few versions look exactly the same.. so I was probably wasting my time doing stuff no one would notice but me. And..and.. that round blue window is very distracting and annoying! Oh well.



This drawing was definitely a challenge, and I'm not sure if I completely like the final version, but at least its better than it was ... and I hope they like it!