A portrait of Maya

I was commissioned to do a portrait. I had met Maya previously at a gallery opening and have actually done work for her sister before. I started with a sketch referencing a photo i was given, during this step is when i always get the majority of the feel of a person, where i get the lines that make up a person,  before the color in the lines stage. A lot of the times i feel i should just leave the pencil drawing, maybe on the next one i do i will make prints of just the line drawing.

Theres never something i start with particularly with every different portrait (i.e. hair, face, etc etc) I decided to start on the hair, i was told her favorite color was pink so i at least wanted to get the pink down and get the tone of the face to go with that. I wanted to do a strip of extra color in there to have it jump out, since orange is my fav. color fruit and koolaid i decided on that.

This is a close up and a bad photo of the ink work on the hair, i always lose myself in the linework and sometimes overdo it, should have gotten a better close up, shoulda coulda woulda. You can see the orange stripe in the hair with the detail.

This is once i started putting the color to the face, i use acrylics so i always layer, i water them down sometimes too but always layer, i think i will venture into oils at come point but the patience is not with this jedi. One of the things that always gets me at this point is getting the eyebrows right, if i dont, i feel i lose the persons face. and since my work isnt 100% realistic i take care to get them right. At this point i really didnt know what to do with the background i still wanted it to pop off but i felt the white would not be suitable.

This is the finished peice, i added some pattern paper to the back and hit it with some gold highlights, From the last photo at this stage i did more work to the eyes, and worked a shadows more, i wanted to have it feel as if it was flowing from the main image and trickling down so i left the paper torn instead of cutting it at the bottom, i feel the dripping lines from the fingers and hair added to the effect. I enjoyed this portrait a lot, it was a lot of fun and working with a great model made everything easy as well. I like commissioned work where im given all freedom to play around.

All inquiries send mail to Oneeightyone@kilumal.com