Stunning pastel painting today by London Art College student Raffaella Somma – we love it!
Kuga’s Face – This was a very interesting one (I’ve attached an interim image at the beginning stage of the face). Because I enjoyed using the soft pastels so much ……it’s a new medium for me, I decided I’d do the Kuga’s face in soft pastel too. I must admit I was not expecting the problems that I encountered and I had more than one go at it. I decided to use Fabriano pastel paper and chose a blue sheet. At first it looked as though all was going fine but after a while I just could not build enough texture and depth for the picture to come alive and for it not to look really flat. So I used fixer spray hoping it would provide a refreshed base to continue to build on but, it wasn’t to be. After spraying it it became darker and even flatter.
So I started rebuilding the image by laying more colour on it and when I started to define the details with the pastel pencils, because they are harder than the pastel sticks, I soon realised that I was taking off the colour I had put on earlier….so I decided to take the dogs for a walk instead! – The long and short of it I eventually managed to work with both the pastels sticks and the pencils until I was reasonably happy with it.
I realise the eyes are of a brighter and deeper colour than in the reference photograph but I did so intentionally as I felt it looked better and more fitting in the rest of the face. It was challenging to replicate the pointellated aspect of the thick short fur/hair on the Kuga’s face so I tried to represent it with some quick short strokes (more like mini stubbs) on the paper. I’m not entirely sure how else I could have achieved a more realistic result for the fur but I hope you like it. I do think that had I done it on velvet paper it may have given a very different result – maybe I will do it again on velvet paper just for the fun of it and to compare the results on different papers.
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