Matt, with an anxious gaze

[Christy Talbott]

Wow Garth! I love all the subtle and yet vibrant variations of color in the boy's skin. Fun to look at! I guess you prefer oils for their control, but i love the painterly way you use pastel.

I have a set of Sennelier, which I love since before that I'd been using a hodgepodge of miscellaneous cheap stuff I'd had since I was about 10! The thing with oil is you can mix and achieve good color with a very limited palette, but with pastel you seem to need lots of colors-- and still that layering seems necessary... That's been my experience, anyway.

Incredible work, as always!

Christy

[Garth Herrick]

Hi Christy,

And thanks for the wow! I am glad you feel the same about layering pastels and mixing paint. I was pretty frustrated at first, with the colors and values available only being able to locate to a major metro stop, and not a specific local street address, to use an analogy. But with laering and juxtaposing various neighboring colors, or even triads and compliments together, the desired local color effect comes about. I guess paint can be similarly mixed and juxtaposed on the canvas as well, but it is often more direct and safe to pre-mix the desired color on a palette first. So far, pastels are a slower, but more colorfully expressive way to paint an image for me. Also big corrections like moving an eye a quarter of an inch are easily executed with these pastels, with their layering ability.

Garth

[Alexandra Tyng]

Garth,

Did you really do this from a B&W photo? Or is this from a different series of photos? Either way, it is so impressive! The color vibrancy is indeed remarkable! I also notice a greater freedom in your strokes, as if you felt liberated while working on it. As a result, you can almost see him in motion.

Have you thought about offering a pastel portrait option to clients in your portfolio? This would make an excellent sample.

[Garth Herrick]

Originally Posted by Alexandra Tyng

Garth,

Did you really do this from a B&W photo?

Hi Alex,

No, this was done from an image that was originally a color slide. I apologize for not being clear about that. I spent some time recently tweaking the colors in Photoshop to make it a better resource image.

Well what the heck, here, I will share the photo below. The likeness is not particularly close, as I was more interested in exploring the color. One day I might do the whole figure if I restore the cropped Nike sneakers. Matt was also the kid in a little oil on panel (12 x 7") from 1998. Also here's a BW photo with evidence that I had a pastel pad out for an attempt 26 years ago! Matt's intense gaze could be haunting.

The chromatic challenge of those fluorescent sweat pants always intrigued me. The particular color of those trousers was elusive to Kodachrome slide film at the time, so I have had to manually interpret and restore it from memory, and paint (I think W&N Permanent Rose come closest as a tubed color).

Garth