Mother's Touch Baby Orangutan pastel portrait
11"x12"
Pastel
This is another lesson from Colin where again I chose my own reference photo but tried to utilize his techniques. This is a shot of one tired Mom, but baby is content to just be held in that huge, but tender hand, and hopefully Mom gets a few minutes of peace. This was my first try of the Ingres sand color paper that Colin really likes. Matter of fact he is about the only one who likes this paper. But it does hold a decent amount of pastel and adapts to the blender tool very well. I usually like gray paper, but the sand/beige color goes well as a mid tone and doesn't dramatically alter either the light or dark colors.
The background here is pan pastel and the Orangs are pastel pencil. Finally am figuring out a process to sharpen my pencils and they really do give you a lot of control and detail. I just love all the wild hair that these babies have, although it is scary to put them in, like whiskers you can't be tentative and have to "zip" them on. Later on it will get thick enough to lay down, but at an early age they are just "wild childs". As you can see they also have really big hands and feet as babies, guess like puppies they grow into them. One thing I do that is different than Colin is that I tend to use a lot more colors than he does. I am not sure if he is purposefully keeping a limited palette or that is just his style. I do like though, his philosophy of no straight black. A big challenge in this piece was getting the flaky facial/hand skin and wrinkles. Just winged that one, scribbled over the base color and then came back and added highlights over the top. I think I could have actually accentuated it a bit more - but that will be next time. I am ready for this piece to be finished.
Thanks much for stopping by and taking a look.
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