Project 14: Vivian

For my next project I wanted to do a portrait of my goddaughter Vivian. I had started on a portrait of her younger sister who is also my goddaughter, Rosalie, and wanted to draw Vivian too. A classmate of mine is really good at portraits and, honestly, I want to try and get as good as she is at it. But my first attempt...not so successful.

Yea...not good. Skin color is hard but I was determined to get it right. I started with pinks and purples and added yellow and brown before any skin tone prismas. I started to practice her eye and using colors to add depth to the skin...

I really wanted to get this right, so I tried-tried again.

I traced the important lines of the face, I wanted to get the outlines right because it's really hard to draw children and the technique i really wanted to practice was using skin colors.

I re-traced the lines with a white pencil and started using oranges and purples to bring out shadows and highlights. I layered yellows and browns and skin color pencils and did a lot better than the first time. I then did the hair, which was a lot easier for me since i've drawn hair many times before. This is the final project:

Much better, right? Overall, I'm really happy with the end result and glad I kept going after my frustrating first attempt at  coloring skin. If I were to do it again I would color at more directions so that the texture wouldn't be so wood-like.But I'm still pretty pleased with this.