Competition winner
 

I''ve just heard about this picture winning the Society for All Artists annual competition (Amateur section)
I really enjoyed the challenges of working to a much larger scale, particularly achieving correct proportions and realistic skin tones.

Congratulations, I'm very happy for you.

Congratulations Margaret! I like the angle that you chose for this piece. I have not heard of the Society for all Artists, where are they located at?

Margaret, this is wonderful news! Congratulations!

Hi and thanks. The SAA are based in England, UK.
You're lucky in the US to have so many societies of pastels and portraiture!

Beautiful
 

Beautiful painting Margaret love the way you focused in on those eyes.

Congratulations Margaret!!

Thank you for sending these two photographs. Actually, I prefer your painting on the second photograph (where the lovely girl holds it). It makes me wonder if the first one is not greatly transformed from the original to the picture.

Do you take pictures of your paintings being totally parallel to the paintings?

Karine

Thank you, well spotted re the photographs! The second image is much closer to the reality of the picture than the first ( the model is holding the picture)
I try my best to photograph the paintings, they look ok on my monitor, but still struggling to get them on to the site without too much distortion (something to do with resizing them)

Margaret, congratulations! The large size of this painting is great and looks very good when it is seen to scale in the second photo. Very nice painting of the face and skin.

I had known about the SAA before you mentioned it and it looks like a very good organisation, so congratulations again!

Dear Margaret,

I indeed think it is a problem of choosing the options when you resize your image. I don't know which software you are using, but you might have the possibility to click on something looking like a chain, or maybe somewhere where a word like proportions is written.
If you resize only one side of your image and not the other one, then the proportions are no longer respected.
If you do not mind, I would like to add another advice, since I think your work deserves to be rendered as nice as possible.
I was thinking that you might want to choose your image quality somewhere when saving it. I would advise you not to hesitate to choose the highest quality or the medium quality. It would prevent your image from being pixelating (is that the correct word?).