Portraiture is the most difficult type of art. The only thing more difficult would be multiple portraits in the same piece. Sometimes when people ask me to draw or paint a portrait, I just say no. I have painted a few people, always with no faces visible.(one more here) I have done many pencil portraits, and each one feels as if it will NEVER look right. 

I drew a pair of Basset Hounds for someone. She showed it to a friend, who sent me a photo of a little girl holding a baby and asked me to draw it. After studying it, thinking about the oblique angle of the girl’s face plus the fact that squinchy-eyed sleeping babies all look alike, realizing that I have many tools with which to “cheat”, I agreed.

Here is the progression of the drawing, which I expected to be a little bit too hard but turned out to be a pleasure to draw. Seeing the photo on the laptop allows me to convert it to black and white or back to color, enhance the contrast, and enlarge anything that I am not quite sure about.

Faces first, because if that part doesn’t turn out, I can quit without too many hours wasted. There were many shapes and textures in the background, and I chose to eliminate them in order to put the focus solely on the little humans. The customer was very pleased and said, “That picture brought tears to my eyes! It’s wonderful!”

That sentiment could have brought tears to my eyes, tears of relief. But I soldiered on to the next project, taking comfort in the fact that it was mountains and citrus groves. (I told a fellow artist that if I was a smoker, I would have lit one up at the completion of this commission.)

Here is a link to the last portrait I drew, hoping it would be the last portrait I drew. Reluctant Portrait