children's portraits, winter 2017 edition

These are the ten portraits I did for Christmas, for the same family I've drawn for several years now. They actually had some really nice photos this year, which made for some great portraits. It was fun comparing the very similar pictures of each kid and seeing which turned out better, but I liked them all.

A. This one is my favorite, probably because I loved the photo so much. It was fun trying to recreate the short depth of field where only the eye and a few strands of hair were really in focus.


















This is the second picture of the same girl, which is cute but not nearly as good. I like the reflected teal in her skin tones.



B.This drawing is my second favorite picture; I really like how the light ooked in her hair, and the skin colors turned out really well. I like her smile better in the second version, but I think the background is a little too distracting.

 
 



 C. I loved how the light on these pictures made colors in the closely cropped hair on this one. Overall I like this first one best, especially the shirt; but I like the rainbow colors in the hair on the second version. In that one I had to fabricate the background because his sister was standing behind him in the picture.

























 D. With this girl I'm not sure which I like better. I like the brighter colors and more polished look of the first version. but I like the horizontal cropped format of the second, as well as the more realistic feel to it.







E. I found it interesting how different this boy looked in his two pictures, because one is looking down at his face, while the other is angled up.

M family 15 portraits

Since August I have been working on portraits for the "M" family. It has become a tradition for them to order Christmas portraits from me every year, and I am honored that they keep coming back! Sometimes I have just one portrait per kid, once I did two; this time I had three portraits per kid, for a total of 15 drawings. I suppose I could have done a repeat of the same picture three times, but that would have been drudgery. Besides, now it will be harder for the family to decide which portrait goes to which recipient. Haha.
In order for me to finish these on time, I had to stick to a schedule of so many drawings per month. This meant I had to get started even when there might not be good photos available for me to work with yet.
With this family, I get to pick the photos I want from the pictures they've posted on Facebook. This is nice because I get to choose, but also annoying when the pictures aren't high quality. When one kid might not have any good pictures up yet, I try to wait on drawing that child in hopes that a better picture will show up in time for me to draw it.
This has been an interesting study in what a difference the photo makes when you get a portrait done (for any of you who might want such a thing in the future.) Sometimes one I thought looked good will pale in comparison to a later portrait from a better photo.
So, is the picture low quality and pixelated? I might not be able to see the details very good. Even the angle might change what they look like: is the camera too close and distorting the shape of their face? All things to consider when choosing a photo.
So I've organized these with the three pictures of each kid together, with my least favorite of the three first, and my favorite last in each group.

A.
I like all three of these, but I find it interesting that they all look like a completely different girl! Also, she looks a lot like River. Each photo was under completely different lighting, and I had to zoom in to varying degrees. At first, the middle portrait was my favorite, and I still really love it. The photo was crisp and up close, the lighting was pretty good, and the expression was cute.
 But when I drew the third one, I was absolutely in love with it. I predict the family will like the second one best because it's so fun, but I can't stop obsessing over the third. The photo was dark and I wasn't too happy about it, but it turned out so awesome. I love how her face blends into the shadows on the edge, I love the colors,the direction of the light, and the softness of it. Of course, I tend to prefer more serious or subtle expressions to big smiles, so there's that too. It's my favorite out of all 15 drawings for sure. The photo here doesn't do it justice.

B
This is "A"s brother. They all turned out well, and again the angles make him look very different in each one. The light was kind of orange in the first photo, but I like the way it translated to the drawing, and his funny expression. I like the second one because I think it looks most like him, from the photos I've seen.  I waited till the very end of November to do his last portrait,because I couldn't find a good photo anywhere. When I blew this one up it was very pixelated, so there are no hard lines in the drawing, but it just gives it a pastel-like texture, and I kind of like it. The expression is great too!

 
 

C
Out of all the kids, I feel like this girls portraits were somehow the least successful. The first one I though was okay when I drew it, but the more I look at it, the less I like it. She kind of has a fake smile, and there is something weird about her nose. The eyes are odd too. The second one is the one I drew first. It's shadowy, which is okay (I mean, look at the first baby's picture that I like) but it was hard to see the details in her mouth and I'm not sure it looks like her enough. In retrospect, a different background color might have been better too.
The third one is by far the best. I think it looks like her, but a bit older somehow. I like the colors a lot. I just finished this one in November.

 

UPDATE:
So I decided to make a fourth picture of this girl. This put me a week over my self-imposed deadline, but I really wanted to do it. I used this one to replace the portrait with the yellow shirt, but for a while I was debating on replacing the second one instead, because it's not my favorite. I hope they like this one! The photo had crazy colored hair, so I made up the hair colors, based on the light.  The background is the same color some of her hair was dyed in the photo.




D
So on the first picture, the lighting was dark, and she was far away so the resolution was bad too. I thought I could make it look better as I drew it, but I wasn't very successful. She looks okay, and is posing cute, but I wish her hair was down or something. I used it because it was a first day of school picture.
 At first, the second portrait was my favorite of her. The photo was outside, it was close up so had good resolution, and you could even see freckles on her face, which I didn't even know she had! But then I finished the last one, and I love it even more. The photo was good enough that I could zoom in closer, she's wearing cute clothes, and she has a cute smile. I'm sure the family will love that one best. In the photo, she actually had some face paint on, so I had to omit that in the drawing.This photo doesn't do justice to the colors in her face, like her pink cheeks!






 


E

Everytime I draw this family, they don't have many pictures to choose from for this guy. I guess he's really active and it's hard to get him to hold still. Fortunately, I got several this time.
The first was a very shadowy, pixelated picture, but it still worked out well. I like his smile and the colors in that one.
This second one is great; it was in the daylight, he's smiling, and it was close-up. I drew it first. The third picture is my favorite. I like the angle of the photo, his serious expression, and the colors that were there! I think the family will like the happier ones better, but I like this one second out of all the portraits I drew this time.

 

Are there any that stood out to you?

E family portraits (7)

The E family have been my clients since about 2007. They recently commissioned me to draw their last seven grandkids! They didn't need them anytime soon, so I worked on them throughout the summer, finishing the last one in early August in between my personal projects.
I did have to re-do one (the mom wanted me to use a different photo but hadn't specified this beforehand). It turned out that the second drawing looked better anyway, so it was all good.
I was glad to be able to work on these in the spring and summer months, because I can get much better photos of the artwork. In the winter the photos always turn out too dark and the colors are off. Maybe I should invest in some good studio lights? It's definitely incentive to get things done before the winter.

These first three boys were all completed close together. I liked working with the photo of the middle boy in green the best, but think the drawing of the far right one turned out the best. I had to laugh when I realized the boy on the left (with the tongue sticking out) was a boy I'd drawn as an infant. In that first drawing/photo, he'd also had his tongue sticking out. They must have wanted a different picture of him, but I thought it was funny that he was doing the exact same thing!

For this next boy I was given three pictures and could choose which one I liked.  I picked this one because the other two photos had his shirt collar partially covering his face. The grandparents mentioned that their favorite facial feature was his dimples, so I had to study the other two pictures to see where to put them: they didn't show up when I printed this photo to look at. I was glad they'd mentioned it, or I might not have known to draw them in!

For this girl I wasn't sent a digital photo; instead they sent me a small wallet size picture! I scanned it and printed a big copy to look at, but it was hard to make out a lot of the details. I was really worried that it didn't look like her, but they said she looked just right. Personally, I think her lips are wrong, but I'm not gonna bring it up.  Plus my camera has that thing where it makes yellows look to garish, so this isn't a completely accurate representation of the real drawing.

Finally, I was given some portraits of a pair of cute twins, a boy and a girl. This is where I had several photos, and I assumed I could pick the ones I like best. Apparently, the grandparents thought that too, and were surprised when the mom asked  me to re-do the girl. I was glad I picked the right picture for the boy! He turned out really good.

This is the first version I drew of the girl. I had pulled up the two different photos of her on the computer, and my family helped me pick the facial expression they thought was the cutest. It turns out the mom wanted the other picture because it shows the baby's teeth, which I totally understand as a mom.

Here is the second picture of the twin girl. I am not sure if the color was really better on this second picture, or if I just got a better photo, but I like the brighter colors for sure.



On to the next project!

M family...again!

Also this year, I did portraits for the "M" family! This is the third year in a row that I've had the chance to draw these cousins, and it seemed to make the process that much easier because I didn't have to wonder at the exact color of their eyes or hair: I'd done it before! It was fun to see how they've grown over the last year! The background colors here are similar to the blues in the last post; for some reason the very lightest blues aren't picked up by my camera very well, and the brown of the paper shows through, so you can't see how smooth the color transitions really are.
First we have this cute brother and sister:





It was fun drawing this girl because it wasn't the typical smile. The photo for the above girl was taken in fairly low light, and her face was dark and a little blurry, but I attempted to draw it with more of a "blurry" style with few hard edges, and I think it turned out great! It was actually fun and kind of freeing.. It was similar to the way I drew this cat a few years ago:

 Then there were these three siblings, the youngest of which was a newborn when I drew her last year! I had some interesting challenges with these too. For the baby, the picture I was initially given had some kind of phone filter that made it all soft-edged; cool for a photo, but really hard to draw for a drawing. At the last minute her mom posted a new picture of her on facebook; it was crisp and in focus, but the top half of her head wasn't in the shot. So I used it for the face, then drew an imaginary version of the bow from the first photo, as it was hard to see what her headband was like in this new photo. It turned out pretty good! Also, she was in a car seat, and I had to make up how her shirt was, which is why there are no folds or anything fancy to be seen in the cloth. My photo is slightly more yellow than the real drawing. (all three have very similar colors, the photos were just taken under different lighting conditions.)






















As for the brother, the photo I worked from was black and white! Again, his first photo had a weird filter on it so I couldn't really see the shape of his nose or anything. So I took the black and white photo to draw the details, then loosely borrowed colors from the first photo. Not bad. I think he looks older in this photo than he is in real life, but I hope his family won't think so.

 Finally, the oldest sister turned out great. Her photo was taken in sunlight and was just right for drawing.

This time around, drawing these kids was a breeze!

N cousins

 I recently completed a group of portraits  of nine kids, all cousins. They turned out pretty cute! (These first two are brothers).
 

 




















I was originally going to have a blue background on all of them, but this girl's photo had such a pretty green background that went with her red hair, that I had to leave it in the drawing. I figured I'd color her red-headed brother's portrait the same.  (These next three are siblings.)

 

 



Then I got to this boy, and realized the blue background was exactly the same color as his shirt, so he needed a different color; green didn't go with it at all.I finally went with brown, because his sister's photo had brown in the background and it looked nice, so I could color both of them the same and there'd be two in the set. While the photos don't do them justice (as usual) I like how these all turned out. (These four are siblings.)

 

This girl's plaid shirt was the hardest part of all of these portraits.

 
 

I think my favorites are the red-head boy with the striped shirt, and the girl with the big blue bow. I hope their grandparents like them!