Portraits, Paper, and Lamps

Over the last few weeks, I had the chance to work on four portraits for my cousin to give to her parents for Christmas! The portraits are of her four nieces and nephews, my cousins too.

 I was so happy to have my daylight lamp that Joseph got me for my birthday this summer!

 

 

 

There is generally only a small window of daylight where I can work on portraits,(one of the reasons it takes so long to finish) depending greatly on the weather and time of year. Winter is generally a dismal time to do such work. But with this lamp, I could still work on overcast days, and even when it started getting dark! It was a great help.

Regular lights are too dim for my eyes, plus they make the colors look wrong on artwork so it's not advisable to work under those conditions.

 

Here is the first one I completed of "S". The photo was really nice! It had great lighting, the clothing and pose were interesting; I loved it. I hate how my camera doesn't capture the subtlety of colors in colored pencil, but this was the best picture I got. Just believe me that there are lots of colors in her white ruff, and her face. I was sad too when I tried to print out my own copy, the turquoisy blue of her dress didn't translate in the ink colors of my printer. Oh well.



 

 

 Next is her cousin, M,  who has one blue eye and one brown eye! That was kind of cool. His photo looked like it was maybe taken under fluorescent lights, because his face had a yellowish green caste to it; I kept having to remind myself to correct the color and not copy it exactly. Again, there is a lot of color in his face that wasn't captured by the camera!

 

Here is a close up to show some of the color, though it's still not as bright as real life.

 

 The third drawing of "S"s little brother "W" is on a different kind of paper than the others. When I first started doing these commissioned childrens portraits around 2007, I had this perfect paper. It was a light pink in color, thick and sturdy, and perfectly smooth, which worked great with the way I draw. Eventually, it ran out and I haven't been able to find a similar paper since!

The paper on which I did these other three portraits was the same type of paper I like, except for the color: light blue. It works, but it's not nearly as perfect for skin tones. Anyway, I bought this paper thinking I'd found the perfect thing, but it turned out that it had more texture to it than I first realized.

 

In this close up, you can see how it has these ridges. Blah. I don't completely hate it, because it made the drawing look almost like it was in pastels, as I couldn't make any hard lines. But yeah, I couldn't make any hard lines. So this is the only one on the pink paper.

 

 This final portrait is also an "M" just like her brother with the mismatched eyes. She was wearing a cute Minnie Mouse outfit in the photo-complete with ears! I decided to leave out the ears (I didn't ask first- maybe I should have. Oh well). This photo was taken on a phone and for some reason my computer couldn't read the file types of all the pictures of this girl, so I had to take screenshots of my email, and print sections of it-it was bigger than the screen.

I think this one turned out technically well, though I worry that it doesn't look completely like the real girl. Hopefully the recipients will think it's perfect.

 

Here is a comparison of the pink paper to the blue, though the photo doesn't show it as well. Maybe you can see how the skin looks warmer and..pinker on the boy, but the background turned out nicer on the girl's portrait. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't' cover up the ridges of pink for a smooth background.

 

All in all, I think it's a pretty good set of kids!

 

 

 

October and Halloween

Yes, I am aware it is almost December. What else is new? So, Halloween. This year, we did a few extra things to try and make it a fun holiday. My mom had sent Elora's birthday present packed with big pieces of butcher paper, so we thought, "Hey, decorations!"

 

 

Everyone got to draw something to hang up...even Josh participated, and he never likes to do creative stuff. He made three big ghosts; this was the most unique of his creations:

 

 

He says they're all screaming ghost faces all on the same body. Creepy.

 

 

Josh also made Mike Wasowski from Monsters Inc. I think he forgot about the whole 'one eye' thing. Oh, and Elora made a ghost with a rainbow outline.

 



 

 



 

 

We carved pumpkins just a couple of days before Halloween. We usually do it earlier in the month, but we forgot to get pumpkins when we were all in town...you know, the store being far away and all. This year, Elora and Joshua carved theirs completely on their own! Good job, guys. I helped Jonah make his skeleton pumpkin.

 

 

from left: mine, Eli's, Joseph's, Joshua's, Jonah's, Elora's

 

As for costumes, I was keen on spending as little money as possible. Also, I don't want to sew much. So this is what we came up with. Elora wore a dress that I've worn for Halloween, as has my mom and grandma! I just hemmed up the bottom so it would fit her. I bought her a $4 mask to go with it, and we said she was maybe going to a costume ball? We weren't sure what she was, but she looked cool!

 

Josh was excited to be a pirate. We already had the sash, we just had to buy a cheap set that came with a sword, earing and eyepatch. (He kept making the sash tighter.)

 

Oh, and we added the beard. He was quite dashing:

 

Eli and Jonah had fun trying on all of our costumes before they decided what to be:

 



In the end, Jonah got to wear a cape and the fireman hat he got for his birthday; Jonah was a clown, wearing the same costume that I wore (my mom made it),Josh wore, and Elora wore before him! We got him a wig and some clown makeup to, which he was very excited about. In fact, at the end of the day when I was washing it off, Jonah had the biggest sad lip. When I asked what was wrong, he lamented, "I don't want you to take the clown off!"

 

Can you believe he's not actually wearing any white paint on his face?

Oh, and as for me, I wanted to be a gypsy. Because that's not racist. Actually, I just wanted to wear the purple striped tights I bought, so I wavered between witch and gypsy: I decided the skirt I had looked more gypsy. I just wished I had some brightly colored scarves, or you know, coin belts like belly dancers have. But this would have to do:

 

At the school thing, Elora and Josh both got second place for their costumes in their class! I think they were also judged on if they danced or did something cute as their class walked around the gym.

 

 

 Eli and Jonah didn't get to walk around with the preschool age kids-they didn't do that category this year- so they walked around with Daddy and his second grade class. I think Jonah was a little embarrassed, but Eli loved it!

 

 

If you couldn't tell, Joseph was superman. All in all, we were  a pretty good looking bunch!

 

 

Before we went out trick-or-treating, we had mummy dogs for dinner:

 

Then it was off into the night! In our neighborhood, the majority of people leave and go to a bigger city to get their candy. We have found that there is plenty if we stay here though, even though we go to maybe ten houses- it still lasts for weeks after, with rationing.

I got better pictures of us trick-or-treating, but I thought this one looked cool:

 



 

I hope your Halloween was just as fun!



 

 

Autumn Colors

Autumn in South Dakota! While we had that huge snowstorm the first week in October (you know, the one that killed tens of thousands of cows, and left some people without power for weeks because of snapped poles on the power lines) the rest of October was beautiful! I had the opportunity to take a few pictures when I was driving west to Pierre (pronounced "Peer") later that month. A lot of crops were ready to harvest, like millet, wheat, and sunflowers. While North Dakota is the state with Sunflowers on the license plate, South Dakota has it's fair share. Check it out:

 

 

The red stuff is millet.

I love this shot of the sunflowers!

This is a little roadside park near Hayes, SD. There were some migrating geese hanging out when we stopped by.




Now these fields are all yellow, but they looked cool as we approached home
 this day.  Look, over there is where we live!

Eight

So I decided I really loved the baptism pictures we took of Elora by the window at church.

The last three years we have taken  some lovely pictures for Elora's birthday, but they all had the same grassland backgrounds; this year I decided I wanted something different. Why not do more like the window picture? Of course, I always forget that I'm much better at taking pictures outside than inside. Part of that is I don't have all of the tools I need to take better inside pictures- something to reflect light or a secondary light source, plus I usually forget my tripod.

This time I also had light that wasn't as bright and perfect as I'd had the day before for the window picture- it was overcast and dim. On top of that I had conflicting ideas about what I wanted. I loved the mysterious high contrast photo I had already, but I also wanted some that captured her smile and had less harsh lighting. I had one from the previous day where I liked her expression (yay, dimple), but her face is too shadowy- I know it will print too dark.

 

 



 

In the end, I decided the first picture from Saturday is the one I will hang on my wall, but at least now I have some smiling ones to choose from for her scrapbook too.

One thing that made the first pictures nice was the contrast of her white shirt. The next day she wore a lacy shirt she got for her birthday, which I thought would add some interesting texture, but really the white shirt was better. Also, because of the dim light (and no tripod) the pictures aren't nearly as sharp. Boo.

 

I liked the black and white aspect of the original picture, so I made most of these in both black and white as well as color to see which I liked better. Here's the first group of b+w.



 

 

I like the contrast of the bottom left, the expression in the top right,
and the composition of the bottom right.



I wish the bottom left had the nice eye detail from the right.
 I do love the color of her shirt in the top left though.

I just realized I don't have the color version of this photo in the group, so here ya go. I like this picture a lot, but it will definitely print dark:
























 Here are a few horizontal ones:

On the bottom one, now I'm thinking maybe
I'd like it more without the added texture around it. Hmm.

 



Here are some with more body. I like composition of these ones, but I would like them more if they had a sharper focus. I'm also thinking maybe I should've taken the molding out of the picture?

 

I really like the gesture in the bottom photo,
I just with the light was better and the detail was sharper.

 

This one is okay..I'm wondering if I'd like it better if it were whiter.
 What do you think?

 I did take one picture I really liked; unfortunately, it wasn't really a portrait. oh well.

 

 

 

Elora is a cute eight year old no matter what kind of photo we take!

 

Baptism

Last week, Elora got baptized! She was kind of nervous, but everything went pretty well. We had to go to a church building other than where we usually meet, as ours didn't have a baptismal font. We did stop at our church on the way though, to get the cd player for the music (no one in our Branch plays the piano, and we weren't sure if they'd have one in meeting room anyway.)

At our church building, I brought Elora inside for a few minutes, because I had this idea for taking some pictures in front of the big windows, and they turned out pretty nice! We have way too much junk around our walls to take pictures like this at our house. Not to mention the fingerprinted windows...)

 

 

I love this sideways look, it's even better in black and white. I just wish I had something to reflect the light for this forward facing one, so her face wasn't so dark.

 

Elora got to wear a special hair ribbon for her baptism. Grandma sent it to her before her baby blessing, when she wore it on her wrist. It came with a pretty poem that says to wear it in her hair for her baptism day, and she can wear it again when she gets married. Elora thinks it's very pretty.

 

 

At the baptism, there was another girl from our Branch also getting baptized, so it was nice that Elora didn't have be be alone! They only had these two outfits for the girls to wear: one jumper and one dress; Elora chose the dress. It kept hanging down around the neck, so I was glad I'd had her wear a white undershirt!

























Elora and Daddy were ready to take the plunge! The missionaries had filled up the font earlier, and told us that the water wasn't very hot because someone  had been at the church taking showers? They said it was lukewarm, and we just shrugged our shoulders, but when the other family arrived they insisted they refill at least part of it with some hotter water. Even with the hot water added last minute, everyone said it was still mighty chilly!

























The font was different than any I'd seen before; it was in the Primary class room, where they took a cover off of middle of the floor..in a carpeted room! Yeah, they got the floor pretty soaking wet when they each got out.

 

We were all very proud of the girls for getting baptized!

Eli would NOT smile for any family pictures.

 

No one in our group had been to this church building before, and it was kind of neat to see some tile work in the hallway. Elora and I had some fun taking pictures around the colorful design. Her skirt even matched it!









































































After everyone got dried off, we all went to Dairy Queen. It was a fun day!