Exercise Creating mood and atmosphere

Below are my works for this exercise. I challenged myself to bring the mood  I caught on the photos to my drawings via creating  precise facial expressions on  paper  and choosing a right medium.

On the first photo below  is my 9 years old daughter Nicole waiting for her ballet class. She is at peaceful moment of waiting, relaxed before the intense class.

I, actually, find a lot of potential here  for figurative painting in oil and I think I will develop this image into oil painting artwork later. Nicole here is very calm. I did her portrait using HB and 7B graphite soft pencils.

Nicole, pencil on paper

Another work is also full of mood because both subjects have distinct facial expressions of joy. On the photo there are my two years old son and me enjoying our time together. Pencils again:)

I called this  drawing as “Madonna or Me with my Mom”;

Motherhood, pencil on paper

Exercise Conveying character:

Below is a portrait of my friend Jeanette. She is very feminine, loves to dress up and i love the way she does her make up. I wanted to bring her femininity onto paper. I used my set of oil pastels by Pentel Arts, a thin brush and a painting medium for oils by Talens. I also used wet baby napkins for  smoothing the background and a black ink for the hair.

First I did  a sketch by pastel pencils; then I worked on top of the pigment with a  brush. For my object`s complexion I used  #7 Pale  Brown pastel. I smoothed the coarse pigment of the oil pastels using  the wet baby napkins. In my subject` s image I wanted to enhance a delicate look of her facial line, including her nice jaw line and a colour of her complexion. I did it via creating a darker multicoloured background.

I think this is one of the best portraits I made so far because people recognise her and I definitely managed to create a very feminine and delicate image of my friend. It appeared as done in illustrative genre.

Jeanette, oil pastels on paper

Above is a portrait of my father, 69 years old. I made it using my memory and his photo I made in Izmir. We had a good time together, Dad was happy, he was relaxed and  was in a good mood. This portrait was a challenge for me because before I painted  only women `s and girls ` portraits. This is a first portrait  I did for a man. I also wanted to paint it because  the image contained a lot of wrinkles and shadows. The good medium  for that kind of task I thought would be an aquarelle. I used a special paper for aquarelle painting by Canson and my aquarelle set by Sennelier. I used  thin brushes for facial features and wrinkles  and a thicker ink brush for shadows and tones. My Dads eyes and eye brows were quite easy, the most challenging and difficult part was his nose. I had to re do it several times and used some wet baby napkins to get rid of  pigments and shapes i placed wrong. To enhance  his mood I made him wearing a white t shirt and put some blue, sea like colour as a background, so his face would look as tanned, what  would show his masculinity and joyful moment.

Below is a portrait of my Mom I made with my  extra fine aquarelle  48 colours set by Sennelier on paper for aquarelle. To channel my emotions of deep  love and attachment to my  Mom I used red colour for her dress and painted her favourite flowers – tulips which come out really nicely with aquarelle technique  tricks.

My Mother, ink and aquarelle on paper

My Mother, ink and aquarelle on paper

Below is a portrait of my friend Manat I did with oil pastels using brushes soaked  in  diluting medium and wet baby napkins which work well to smooth the  Oil pigment. My friend is a beautiful woman who is a bit shy. So I wanted to create an image of a very brave and confident with her beauty woman. To channel the mood of confidence I put her in a red dress, wearing a long earring,  also I  made a colourful life celebrating background.

Manat, oil pastels on paper

While doing the portraits for the  course I found  the  following article as a particularly helpful:

1) “Prolific Painters Share Their Top Tips for Painting Extraordinary Portraits” by Sara Barnes on April 20, 2019, http://www.mymodernmet.com; 

• “Constantly compare sizes, distances, angles, lightness; darkeness” as an artist Jessica Miller suggests.  My comment: I agree, indeed without focusing on every  little facial feature and detail you cant get resemblance. I study the face by  separates little areas, like eye corner, corners of the mouth, the distance between the ear and the mouth and etc. Portrait  painting is all about studying the face in millimetres. You move one little line to couple of millimetres and you  get a new effect or a new face.
• Another artists Shelley Hanna suggests to “…start out by  drawing straight lines at the top, bottom, and the sides, then cut in on key angles to define the shape working quickly…. this helps to capture overall proportion of the subject rather than getting caught up in drawing detailed parts right away, which is very tempting to do”. My comment: I also do a light sketch of overall proportion but I dont focus too much on it because that can limit your ability to set up facial features correctly trying to fir into the general line. So i do a light sketch of the head and then I start working on eyes or, as in my Dads portrait case – I started from his eyebrows because the distance  between them and their size determined the size of his face.