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My first portrait!

daniela.jpg

“Daniela”

Pastel on sanded paper

OK, the plan was to post small paintings done daily on this blog, but as it turns out sometimes plans have to be changed. I DO paint almost every day, but don’t necessarily finish a small painting each day since I also work on larger pieces. That being the case today, I decided to post something different.

Two weeks ago I had the chance to take a one-day portrait workshop with Alain Picard, a fantastic portrait artist (and great painter in general!). In the past I had painted one painting of a group of people from a photo, and had drawn two figurative scenes from photos with colored pencil, but had never worked with a live model. Well, it’s a lot harder than you would think, and a lot less forgiving than landscapes or still life paintings in that the point is to capture as closely as possible the subject matter, without a lot of artistic license. In other words, you can’t cheat. I really enjoyed the experience, and think my first attempt came out OK (but of course judge that for yourself). And it always helps when you work with a gorgeous subject, which Daniela was!

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3 Responses

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  1. Christine V says

    Julie,
    You did an awesome job with this model. I had the pleasure of being in the class with you and am still struggling with portrait studies. You are an inspiration.

  2. Julie says

    Thanks so much! I really enjoyed that class, and hope I can manage to get up the nerve to do more portraits on my own!!!

  3. Alain Picard says

    Way to go Julie, you did a fantastic job for a “first portrait”. I like it alot. I’m sure there will be many more sparkling portrait subjects to come in your artistic future. Thanks for the compliments!

    Alain



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