Pastel Portrait

Going into this project, I had no idea how to use pastel, in all honesty I was excited and slightly scared. The first day of this project we had a photoshoot where the class went inside the drama studio and had fun with the interesting lighting, poses, and angles. Once we had the picture we were happy with from the photoshoot, we edited the photos on Pixlr and made the lighting crazy and unnatural. The crazly edited pictures were what we used as a reference for our portraits. The pictures were printed and we got to work with our pastels. In this project, I wanted my final product to resemble me and I wanted to properly use the pastels with their blending. When I started using the pastels, I realized that blending wasn’t needed and it actually made my portrait look worse so I chose different colours that were closer to each other and had a gradient effect on the drawing. If I could change my portrait I would not have kept going over parts of the drawing as I made the eyes too strong in the portrait. I should have stopped drawing and left it as it was to look at and review the next next day. I was always unsatisfied with the final product so I kept adding more colour and details that weren’t even existent, in the end I think I accidently made my portrait look like Mona Lisa in the sense where the expression on my face is neither happy or sad.

Done