New to pastels - feedback requested, work in progress

You're on the right path Dawn however I am no expert on the medium

I concur with Derek, however there are many issues here Dawn. My advice would be to get a good book on portrait drawing which should include anatomy, study it in depth and follow the methods and techniques associated with this most difficult of disciplines, and only then move onto using a different medium such as pastel. If you don't start off with the basic knowledge you will find it a hard struggle to improve. Sound draughtsmanship is the key when attempting life drawing and portraits, there is little room, if any, for errors.

Very good advice Dawn. I'm not a portrait painter but if I was learning I would definitely follow Alan's advice and learn all about that first before trying out soft pastels on them. Will look forward to seeing more of your work. This is a great start!

Hello Dawn, I think it is good first attempt, however you might need to work a bit more with pastels to control them better. Pastels are medium used to give feather like touches, you are using it like it was a charcoal sketching a bit ;-). I use pastels, but do not do portraits (I get bored by faces other than animals), however when doing dogs I use one of light grey (peach or ambers coloured for human in your case) pastel pencils (I use koh-i-noor pastel pencils- you might prefer other) to start with to get the shape, main lines (gently, gently), suggestion of hair shape and most obvious shading - in human that would be the shadowing on forehead, nose, under eyes and cheek bone structure as well as chin etc- be gentle there, just suggestion. You should be able to recognise your subject when you do this very easily and adjust anything which might seem to not represent the person you are drawing (tip here- cover parts of your drawing to compare what you see and what you drew). Then start with colour- you already will have the base colour in the pastel pencil you used and might find it that way easier to adjust. Use clean cloth and soft eraser (that would be the one which looks like bluetag plasticine) to take away anything what does not seem right (use the eraser via blotting of course, it doesn´t work otherwise, in case you are not familiar with them) but also you can use both to take away colour from where light reflects (note hair and eyes mainly as well as protruding parts of human face- ie chin, nose, cheeks, above eyes etc.). Look well before starting, keep looking, notice specifics of the face, what makes it different than other faces- thinner nose maybe? straight eyebrow? Eyes too close? Mouth more generous? Keep looking for what seems to be irregular. We all react to very balanced faces as beautiful, but nobody has such a thing- so remember that. Some people´s are more balanced than others, but no face sits perfect ;-) Also, skip the glasses all together with next few portraits, it will distract you and will require you to spend more time practising. Glass is not the easiest subject to draw in any medium to start with. I used to get all glass looking like marble because I had trouble stopping myself from drawing what my brain was telling me what I see instead of what my eyes saw. It is important to remember that our brain fills the lines which we might not really see, so have a look at works of people who are masters of the medium and note the details which are missing as well as those which are not ;-) There is no shame in learning from those who mastered a medium, if there was, we would still spit pigment on our hands in caves ;-). Hope I am not being too knowitallist, not sure how much experience you have with different media, so just tried to cover basics. I would personally start with bunch of flowers in ceramic vase when starting with pastels ;-). It will sit there all day for several days without much change and you can work on pastel wielding if you have good light as much as you want. Good to do same flower set of course to note all the different colours and shapes they can represent when seen in different angles. Amazing stuff- flowers ;-) I hate drawing apples personally, that is what we always did when learning to use new medium- cloth (draperie), 2 or 3 apples, bowl and jug... Can not see apple without my stomach turning :-D

JTA! Hope you have a stand (easel). Draw as close to straight up as possible in portrait and body. JTA 2- flattering portrait- always at a slight angle, we all look terrible on passport photos where they insist we stare straight into camera. I swear I can not believe how unattractive people are that way.

I agree with Alan, but if you do want to use an easel, study the Lowrey method - Arnold, that is, not L S. He has some pastel painting demonstrations on YouTube, and had some - don't know if they're still there - on the painting and drawing channel. The paper he uses is suspended by bulldog clips at the top, and perhaps at the sides, but hangs free at the bottom - his easel has a channel for collecting the dust. This way, there's nothing to impede access to the bottom of the paper - and the demos are fascinating anyway, not that I've found I can emulate him with pastel, it's a medium with which I struggle. I've not commented on your portrait because others have got there first and I don't disagree with them - I think it's a good start; portraiture is probably the single most difficult thing you can do, although I find drawing complicated machinery worse (and try not to do it) but if that's what you want to do, nothing will stop you: if it helps, the two keys for me are measuring the features and their relationship to each other, and slightly exaggerating to start with as though you were drawing a caricature, cutting into that to achieve more true detail - a cartoon often has more life than a very cautious, clinical drawing, so that's why I do it. But different things work for different people. http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk

A piece of advice for you Dawn from an old girl who was put off for years from trying to paint. I read too many books which emphasised on how important it was to paint "correctly". It was so technical that I didn't take the risk. However, when I did try it - my way - it was trial and error, the only way to do it. You are probably feeling a little overwhelmed by all the advice being given, but that is all it is, advice from artists when they have tried things out for themselves. Some things work better for certain artists. I've always regretted being put off and wasting such a lot of time. Ask yourself what is the worst thing that can happen if it goes wrong. The answer is that you learn from it, something all of us are doing continually. There are no art police, at least not at the moment. Have fun, see what works and use this wonderful advice just as a guideline. I am sure we will be looking forward to seeing how you progress.

Agree with Adele - there's no reason for you to feel deflated: you made a start in a medium you weren't familiar with and you took on the most difficult discipline of all, portraiture, AND you achieved a result - it may not have been as good as you hoped it would be, but come on: you weren't expecting to be a Rembrandt in five minutes, I'm sure! Adele's also right about the amount of advice, and reading books, and watching videos - there's an awful lot to take in: and the more you read, the more you'll come across advice that conflicts with what you've just read - which is annoying.... I wrote an e-book on oil painting a couple of years ago, and in doing the research for it I found an awful lot of advice online, and in books, which was either grossly out of date (materials change, and we find out a few things about them which weren't known to earlier generations) or just plain daft. I also found that most of the people, I should say, who write books and articles purporting to offer guidance have actually forgotten what it's like to start out knowing absolutely nothing; or if they do remember the things they wanted to know when they began, are incapable of bridging total ignorance and a reasonable level of proficiency: so what I tried to do was write for those who knew nothing while not alienating those who knew something. Don't really know how far I succeeded, but that's what I tried to do. I've read books on pastel, I've watched demos - I find most of them hopeless: either they assume more knowledge than I've got, or they're simplistic to an irritating degree. But I'm sure I'd get better with pastel if I practised far more - I don't, because I'm not fond of the dust in the quite confined space available to me, I already paint in oil, acrylic and watercolour and haven't much time to investigate other media to the extent I'd like, and then there's the storage problem. But what you need, and what I need, is just that, practice - in time you learn to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of advice, but that's largely because you build up your own layer of expertise by working at it yourself. So don't be deflated - get yourself a range of pastel papers, and some cartridge paper, and do what Michaelangelo instructed his apprentice to do, which is as true now as it was then: "Draw Antonio, draw Antonio, draw, draw, and do not waste time": not one to mince his words - and he was right. http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk

And it is true, isn't it Sylvia, that we all have to start from somewhere!