Friday, January 22, 2021

The Light-A Portrait of Amanda Gorman

 Hi.  I have been busy playing with portraits and clearly not finding the time to blog, but thought I would take a moment to post a few photos of what I have been working on.


The first step is always the drawing, but I forgot to take a photo of that.  In the second step, I lay out some of the shadows which establishes the structure of the face.  Then I added the highlights in the pupils so that I would be able to get her expression correctly. Can anyone guess who this is?  Not a lot of clues at this point....But maybe you can guess from the title of this post?





Blocking in the hair helps but the lips are making things much easier to identify.








A little more work on the eyes and more shadowing help bring a very glamorous poet laureate to life.  This painting is based on a photo of Amanda taken for an article on Afro hair styles, so she is highly styled and made up.  But a beautiful woman is gorgeous no matter what she wears if her spirit is lovely!