Artistic Realism Art Studio

Here it is, finally finished:

Title: Portrait of Ron Hontz
Medium: Pastels
Paper: Canson Mi-Teintes
Size: 28 × 36 cm (11″ × 14″)

The subject of the portrait is my good friend Ron Hontz. He (along with two other friends) introduced me to pastels so it was only fitting to do his portrait using the medium.

I experimented a lot on this portrait, one of which is on the background. I wanted to try a more “creative” and different background instead of a plain one or a simple gradient. I’m not sure I like this one better, but the cloudy effect has inspired other ideas, which I hope to use on other pastel paintings.

Also, the skin tone was based on other pictures as his was a little too reddish in my reference picture.

I am not too happy with the way this portrait turned out, however — a lot of the colors are dulled down and I would have liked a more realistic effect to it. Anyhow, I still have a number of pencil portraits that I’ll try to finish first, but I wish to practice and concentrate more on pastel paintings afterwards, particularly on portraits and landscapes.

Thank you for looking!

Faith

Since Christmas is just around the corner, I worked on some compositions and sketches and decided on the one below. Sketches I made on the reverse side are visible as this is on printing paper .

I have never seen snow in real life. So on this pastel painting, I mostly relied on my imagination and what I can remember of pictures of winter that I have seen before. Working from imagination allows me to use a “looser” approach. It is a contrast to working on portraits from photos where I strive to be as detailed and realistic as I could. I find it quite refreshing to change styles (and subjects) once in a while .

This pastel painting is on 12.7 x 17.7 cm (5″ x 7″) Canson paper. The sky area required a little more work than the rest — it started out very rough — but I greatly enjoyed layering the soft light blue, violet, and white on the snow area . I managed to scan it twice as I was working on it. I have included these scans below.

Faith