Jenna in pencil

Portrait of Jenna my middle daughter in pencil and charcoal 11x14.  Jenna was valedictorian of her class this year,won an art contest for the school which puts her painting on the Shelby County school calendar for this next year.  She also won a school essay contest which earned her a lunch with an author from a book her class read and the school art contest to have her drawing on T-Shirts that the whole school wore on the end of year picnic.  She is a very talented piano player and loves to read.

This was the first of three pencil portraits I tried of each of my daughters.  I used Arches paper and was very pleased with the results.  It is a very forgiving paper and took a lot of abuse.  I've only used three of the sheets so far and I think there are 40 in the binding, so I need to get busy.

I did this picture free hand after using the grid methods for so long.  I always felt like I was cheating using the grid method and found it to be very tedious and frustrating.  I took a class by Daniel Green, a very well know portrait artist a few years ago and was fascinated by how he could capture a likeness using proportions and angles.  I began trying it out and really liked the results.  I found it much easier to get a likeness by just drawing rather than looking for shortcuts to drawing.  I even used to use a projector many years ago but it always had a rather odd look to it in the end and put it away in the attic about 10 years ago!

Mitzy

8x10 charcoal. This is our newest dog named Mitzy. What a terror! Did a quick pencil sketch of her while it was cold and she had on her new sweater. She is like one of those tasmanian devils! Our other dog is named Katy and she is much more calm. I don't know how she puts up with this one! I'll eventually get around to doing Katy's portrait.