Nathan

Dan Landrie · 04-07-2007, 09:40 PM

This is a ref. photo I took of my son Nathan, I'm going to attempt it as a graphite pencil drawing and also a pastel. I would appreciate any suggestion as to changes I might make while executing the pastel especially. The only change I'm thinking about making at this point is darkening the Grey sweat shirt to move it back behind the jaw line. What I liked about the photo was the almost perfect separation of dark midtone and light areas.

This was taken with a FinePix Digital Camera 3.2 mega pixels with a 6x optical zoom The camera was set to ( I don't know what I'm doing ) or ( auto ) which ever you prefer. The flash was turned to off. This is all the info I can give as I'm really not a camera person.

Mischa Milosevic · 04-08-2007, 06:08 AM

Dan, a weary nice looking boy and nice shot as well. This will make a excellent portrait. As far as working in graphite or charcoal i think the photo is excellent and making the light part of the shirt as dark as the sweat is a good observation on your part. I would suggest, if at all possible, to draw his eyes a bit bigger. I would draw his left ear the same as his right. The pastel work will be a bit trickier. What I suggest is to experiment on a separate drawing a rough drawing to say. This will help you figure out the combinations of colors to use. Look at the work of other artists and how they treated the lights and how they balanced the shadows.

Wish you the best and if you care to keep us posted on the progress.

Garth Herrick · 04-08-2007, 02:46 PM

Hi Dan,

A great head! But you get half the credit for that anyway. I like the idea of this photo, but the extreme contrast really bothers me, because I can't imagine how a pastel would look as other than a derivation of a too high contrast photo. There seems to be some clipping in the highlights, but just borderline, so the information can still be drawn out. The shadow passages of the face are too inky dark for my liking.

I have reprocessed your photo in Photoshop using the shadow/highlight adjustment. With this I both increased the highlight depth, and reduced the shadow contrast. I bet there is more useable information with this modification, but you wil have to tell me if this looks natural or not...

Can you reshoot your son in softer light?

Garth

Dan Landrie · 04-08-2007, 06:30 PM

You've done an amazing job in bringing out the best in this photo. The original was taken in bright sunlight and really shows how bad I'm am at taking pictures.

I appreciate your help and will definitely use your version when putting color to paper, as far as the contrast goes I'm having a bear of a time translating values into color and thought this photo would be good practice in that regard because of the high contrast. Thats why I thought I'd start with graphite to boost my confidence a little before I tackled the pastel.

Dan Landrie · 04-08-2007, 06:38 PM

As always your suggestions will be keep in mind. I will certainly do the rough drawing first. I'm really learning the importance of a good preliminary sketch and color study to eliminate problems before they show up in the finished piece.

Thank you again Mischa your help has been invaluable.

The only problem is now I have to sign off and get some work done.