Portrait of a Little Girl with a lot of Flair!

Here's the portrait of a little girl I have been working on off and on for a while.  I did her sisters portrait months ago, but before my Christmas rush.

For you artists, here's my skin color palette info...prismacolors and colorsofts in pinks, peaches, yellows, whites, tans, lavenders, reds and blues.  No "clay rose" or any other greyed color.  I found that they just deadened skin unbelievably.  The blues and lavendars did the job with the shadow sides without making it look pasty and unnatural.

I also didn't copy the photo, it was shot indoors in the shade, so the skin color was way duskier than it really is.  I am lucky that I had an array of photos to consult and could bring out the sunny and youthful skin color.

I am hoping to get my children's portraits out there to the real live public, not just online.  I have two more samples I want to do to be able to take with me to shows...a tiny tot ballerina and a teenaged hockey player.  Of course, I accept commissions online, too, I just want to expand my audience.  Come visit my site full of samples of my pet and childrens portraits!  You can also order via my email, and here's where you can see my animal paintings

Black Lab Portrait with Hunting Scene Landscape Background

This is one of the pet portraits I finished recently.  This guy's name is "DumbDog".  Now, that's not his real name, it's a nickname, and it's not descriptive of this really smart, wonderful fellow.  It's like calling a giant dog "Tiny" or a heavy one "Slim".  One of those silly, affectionate nicks that just stuck.

Of course, Labs love the water, and so I posed him in an environment he loves:  Ready, willing and able to dive right into that marshy wetlands water behind him.

We live near the Heinz Wildlife Preserve that borders Philadelphia on one side and my small borough on the other and often walk with Otto there. Besides the birds of every description, if you're observant, you get to see turtles and frogs, small mammals and lots of deer.  We get a lot of spillover from the birds who live there and stop there on their migrations at our bird feeders less than a mile away.  (We also are gifted by the mosquito visits!).

At one time, of course, much of the surrounding area was wetland...this is one of the only protected urban wetlands left. 

But back to DumbDog.  The specs are that this is a colored pencil portrait, 16" x 20" with prismacolor and color soft colored pencil on Mi Tientes pastel paper.

Another thing this portrait did for me was make me really want to paint outdoors, maybe plein air for all of it or maybe part of it with studio time to finish up.  But that's not going to be colored pencil, which takes too long.  So, I'm currently enrolled in an oil painting class to fill in the gaps of my self-taught painting technique.  There's just a lot of science involved with the mediums used with oils that I need to understand, plus I just love hanging out with other artists and art lovers.  And of course, I'll be showing you my work here and on my Facebook Art Page, HERE which is my short and sweet show and tell!  See you there!!