ONLINE ART COURSE – PASTEL PENCILS – SELF-DIRECTED CHALLENGE

It’s hard to believe that we have come to the end of the fourth module of the course! How time flies… As always, the final project is the “self-directed challenge” where Phil, the teacher, gives us something to do and then leaves us to our own devices to do it, on the assumption that we’ve learnt enough in the previous projects to manage on our own.

Continuing the portrait theme we had last time, first of all he gave us a small exercise to do, making little value swatches of four different skin tones, from four separate portrait photos. We were supposed to do these down the left-hand side of the paper, leaving the rest of the sheet for the second part of the challenge. However, when I’d done my swatches, I realised I’d been working on the top side of the paper rather than the reverse which is much smoother, and I was struggling with the deep texture.

You can see what I mean in the above photo. I decided simply to turn the paper over to complete the second part of the challenge, which was to draw four separate facial features from reference photos.

I did the swatches yesterday, and this afternoon managed the first of the facial features, the eye.

As usual I had a problem with the placing of the image on the sheet, and it ended up a little too low. I shall have to work around this with the other three images when I come to do them.

Here’s a close-up.

This was an interesting subject to do, harking back to our “eye studies” in the first module (graphite pencils). It was interesting working in colour. I have really enjoyed working with the pastel pencils and have found them a great deal less messy than I expected, and if you keep a sharp point on the pencil, you can get some very fine detail.

I shall probably work on one facial feature per day as they do take quite a bit of time.

Talking of time, I also cannot believe that it is exactly a week ago that I was so poorly with a high temperature. It seems like yesterday. I got over the fever very quickly, but it left me totally wiped out for the rest of the week and all my ME symptoms seemed to be worse (and still are). Today was the first day I began to feel better. It’s also nearly a week since my optician’s appointment. What with two bank holidays over the Easter period, I am not anticipating getting a call from them until their “worst-case scenario” two-week period is up, to go in and collect them!

Time is simply racing away these days. Unbelievable that we are into April already. Today would have been Mum’s 103rd birthday! She died when she was 96. We always used to tease her that she had missed being an April Fool by a single day. I don’t know what she would have made of the state of the world today. So much has changed in the past few years.