Expressive Portrait Drawing with Soft Pastels

X Pastel Portait

“We have reached the Final Project unit. You have done the hard part of learning the skills you need to produce successful pastel portraiture and now it’s your turn to apply those skills to a portrait of your own choosing. These are the steps I would like to see reflected in your Final Project. Register for an account on Sktchy or similar or even use a photo using some of the principles we looked at in Unit 2 Lesson 5.

Using 3 sheets of paper which aren’t precious to you, and with a conte pencil, you produce: A three-minute study without thinking too much about proportions, you are just moving the paper and reacting to what you see. Then produce a three-minute study focusing on main shapes and measuring proportions. Finally, produce another three-minute study but this time apply some tone to give form. Take your final piece of paper and begin to use the side blocking to apply flat mid-tone colour to the features. Fill the eyes, nose, lips, cheeks and chin, paying attention to mid-tone in the reference. When the mid-tone has been applied, we now look at where the eye would land within the composition and how it would travel around. As a general rule, large abstract marks leading into a finer more detailed area seem to engage with the viewer. Push and pull the larger marks and finer marks until you feel it is balanced. Once the composition is satisfactory, begin to harmonise the colours, working out either side of the complementary colours on the colour wheel as in Unit 2, Lesson 4. Once you’re happy with the harmony of your colour and the impact you would like the portrait to have, you are ready to photograph, post on social media, fix your work and potentially be waiting to package your work up and take it for shipping. Now it’s time to give yourself a huge pat on the back for all you have achieved. I will be checking in on the forum when I can to see what you have produced and to give you some feedback. Don’t forget to also reach out to fellow students, please support and encourage each other, this is another opportunity for learning. Thanks for following this course with me, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing what you create as a result! You can also find me on social media so you can see new examples of commercial and personal work and you can share your successes too. See you in the forum!”

Partial transcription of the video

“Final Project Well done for reaching the end of this Domestika course. Hopefully, you learned everything you need from the steps in order to create your own pastel portraits and apply these techniques to your projects. As I mentioned before, the beauty of pastels is they are very accessible. It's a medium that fosters speed. I love how you can lay things down quickly and the material textures come through. The time has come for you to create your creative final project. To use the techniques shared and produce a pastel portrait using your voice. A good place to start is to choose a solid re...”

This transcript is automatically generated, so it may contain mistakes.

Course summary for: Expressive Portrait Drawing with Soft Pastels

• Level: Beginner
• 97% positive reviews (292)
• 7838 students
• 4 units
• 16 lessons (3h 18m)
• 8 downloads

• Category

  Illustration

• Areas

  Artistic Drawing, Drawing, Fine Arts, Portrait Drawing, Traditional illustration