50th Anniversary Wall Quilt - Part 3

I haven't done any portrait work in a really long time and I'm glad some of the things I learned came roaring back to me as I worked on these.

I did this picture using nothing but colored pencil and it turned out well since I had a bit of practice on the first 2. This one is much better looking and is a fairly good likeness. I think it'll get a bit better after I get the white veil/dress/tiara and the background tinted.

Dad doesn't look quite so alien like, which is always a bonus! The streaky look of the color pencils though are really bothering me. Especially in dad's black jacket. I'll continue trying to smooth those out and if that doesn't help then I may put on a light wash of black ink to try to smooth it out.

Unfortunately, dad's mouth/lip area isn't all that good but it looks fairly accurate compared to the picture. I think it was a perfect storm so to speak. He's leaning slightly towards mom, head turned towards the camera, a closed mouth smile and there was a bright flash which pretty much made his lips disappear completely and created deep shadows around the upper lip/nose area.

Not sure I'll go for a third drawing. I might though just to see if I can get dad looking a little better. Its usually much easier to fix something from the beginning other than just to fix something after its been drawn. If this was paper I could erase, but I can't since this is on fabric. 

Here's a few close ups:

 

I filled in the background with brown inks. Here's the portrait I painted on white fabric. I call this one my practice fabric.

And here's the one I did on cream fabric.

These portraits turned out really similar, but I think the one on cream fabric looks the best. I darkened some areas on both portraits mainly the mouth/hair/eye areas. Focusing on these features can really make all the difference.

TIP: When drawing eyes/eye brows - Even if your picture just looks like some dark lines for the brows and eye lids, that's really hair. So draw hair/lashes. I couldn't see anything like that from the picture I was working on but adding those little wisps of lashes and hair in the brows really made a big difference.

Here's a close up of mom. Its not a whole lot different from the close up above but darkening the hair around the face and the creases at the lips really make a big difference.

I'm fairly sure my portraits are finished. Sometimes I keep "fixing" something until it's ruined and I really don't want to do that.

I did try to make a portrait just using inks and that was a complete disaster. Guess I'll stick with colored pencils.