from April 25th

Here I am back on "tobacco" coloured paper and doing a bit of cropping. I went with cropping so I could have the face larger and be able to work  more with the shadows.  In the actual drawing, there is a little more space about her hat and her hand is not cropped.  After I did the general outline, I put blue and purple in the shadow areas with hard pastels.  I put white on the lightest places. Then I used a sponge to apply a flesh tone on all the areas of skin with pan pastels. Then I worked with both soft and hard pastels to bring in various colour notes, layering. One of the interesting things with pastels is that even when another colour is layered over, little granules of what is underneath show through and add to the richness. I took my little binoculars and found them useful for discerning detail in the mouth and eyes, especially. Sometimes, with the lighting, it is hard to see everything you want to see. I also used a bit of vine charcoal in the black areas - as well as regular conte' and black soft pastel. So there was a lot of mixing of the various pastels. I find the pan pastels are nice as an under layer as they fill the paper indentations quite easily- making it easier to have richer layers on the top.We had a few quick warm-up poses first so this was about two  hours of work.