The process of making a drawing...

 
 I really wanted to try doing a pastel portrait - as in a person's head only kind of portrait. (Different from the other pastel drawings of people that I have done). So, for my art class I got some good help and guidance from the teacher (her blog is on the right - Anna Peterson)  She is a portrait artist and she gave me some great tips. Because I haven't drawn  portraits in the past (meaning back in the college and pre-college days), I never have had any formal instruction on how to do it. So, I am learning a lot. I really love the drawing I did with her help. I love the photo in the first place, and I love the contrast of lights and darks in the drawing. I thought for fun I would take pictures of the process that I went through to complete the drawing.
I started with this photo:

 Then, I carefully (with lots of revisions) made up a sketch of his face on the paper with chalks. I don't think this photo shows the final sketch, but it might. I don't remember.

 Then I started filling in with color. This picture looks a little freaky because I hadn't put in details of eyes and mouth yet because I was mainly working on skin tones.

 Then, I went back to my class and started filling in more details and putting the dark contrast  of the background in. The difference in the drawing once that dark background was put in was really amazing. Anna also taught me a cool trick for toning down skin color, and she helped me learn how to blend the colors to get the mouth to look like a mouth color, not lipstick. (When you only have so many colors to work with, you have to do a lot of blending. I was surprised at some of the combinations of colors, but it really works - for example, you wouldn't know that I used purple on his face here below).

I thought I was just about done at this point (above). I took the drawing in, and that is when I posted about color and all that I had discovered in my lesson about the colors in the face and the things I learned to improve the drawing.  So, I came home and worked on it some more, adding purples and greens, yellows, reds, oranges, and more. I was amazed at how much it brought life into the drawing. I liked it before, but I like it even better now. (If you look at the drawing above, you can maybe see how brown his face was. The real life thing is much easier to see than a photograph, unfortunately)

And then I went to class again and added more contrast and color, and I finally got to where, if I did anything else to it, I was starting to mess it up worse than fixing it anymore, which is when it is time to stop. I fixed a few details, looked over all of it, and finally decided that I needed to be finished with it.

Here is the final drawing (the same as the one posted above).

The reason why it is one of my favorite drawings so far is that I really put a lot of thought and effort into it. I feel like I really stepped into the world of color more, I loved putting more contrast into the drawing (and hope to be able to do that more in the future) and I just love the photo it came from in the first place. Now, of course, I want to do color portraits of all of my kids. However, my "to do" art list is very long right now. I definitely want to do more of this though. It was really fun.