More pastel pencils

We went to our chalet in blue Mountain for the Holidays, spend Christmas there, skied a little, ate a lot and had fun with my family, since I didn't pack with me much art tools I kept it simple, just sketching here and there, but the sketches I made were not worth posting. This one is.

I took this picture of this woman from a TV interview about elephant poachers, I am not sure if I am in violation of copy rights here or if this is allowed, but rest assured I will not be submitting it to any competition, I just did it for fun, I thought she has such compelling features that I decided to draw her , I discovered that drawing is my strongest skill at the moment, I thought of using watercolor, but since everybody knows how frustrating it is to get the features correct and how challenging it is, I decided to use pastel pencils, the vibrancy of the colours is what attracts me to this medium.

the paper I used is Casson, mi-teinte the rough side of it and the size is 12x18.

pastel

I tried pastel pencils for the same portrait that was done in watercolour, I liked that I could mix colour on the paper without getting mud, on the contrary, I am getting luminous colours, I am having so much fun with these pencils, I am carrying them around with my purse.

Painting the figure

I attended a workshop over the weekend about painting the figure, we had a live model (a different one each day), we did sketches with a charcoal pencil first and then painted, the first day was direct painting (and that was quite a challenge), I also painted on an easel while standing, that was my second challenge as I am always used to paint and draw sitting down, so I was out of my comfort zone for sure. 

The sketches were fifteen minute poses, and the direct painting was half and hour (that was generous of the instructor). The next day, we had the model partially clothed and it was longer poses (the portrait and the model sitting with her hair in a pony tail down with her back to us).

the name of the instructor is Brian Smith, check his website http://drawn2life.com

he is a very generous artist and wonderful instructor. Oh I forgot to mention that everybody was working on acrylic except me, I am the only one who did watercolour, never did acrylic before and I am thinking of trying it, it looks like it is very forgiving and people were more relaxed, according to Brian "watercolour is from the devil" .