Portrait in Progress

Between my Crittenton illustrations, my internship, midterms, and a fun case of mono, I’ve had to keep in mind that I need to keep producing work for my show in April. It’s been hard balancing everything, so I’ve maybe been neglecting my traditional drawing work for the past few weeks. I have a few other projects going, but I worked and progressed a lot of this portrait in the past day or so.

I started this picture and a few others a week or so back. It was a really nice day, so I went out and bought paper, taped it to my walls, and opened my windows. During a critique, I was told that my compositions are typically more interesting when I don’t plan them. So I just… started.

And then quickly stopped. I was drawing on the textured side of the paper, and because it was vertical, my markers were drying up faster. So that was a little bit of a failed experiment initially, so I tucked it away for a while.

I brought it back out during studio the other day. The markers worked a lot better when I was drawing on a table (maybe common sense haha but it didn’t occur to me), and they filled the paper a lot better so the texture wasn’t as visible.

I had a little bit of fun adding some non-traditional skin colors in. For instance, the lavender. It was nice, too, to work on the tan paper because it worked with the skin tone instead of against it. The green that I used all last semester was maybe a little too abrasive, but that’s beside the point. I added a lot more than what I’ve got photographs of. Prismacolor pencils are amazing over marker and especially on toned paper. My highlights look amazing!

Also: check out this roomie-love-connection. We bought the same color paper!

I’ll post the finished piece sometime soon, or maybe you will just have to wait until my show to see! I actually have a little bit of extra work ahead of me, I need to add a background and do a little extra refining, so maybe there will be some progress posts during that as well.

Well, I’m off to celebrate Pi Day at Bakers Square! Hope to hear from everyone, update me on your recent projects!

-Alyssa Lee