Soft and Sweet

Some pictures are just meant to be soft and sweet. This was one of them. Lots of opportunity to play with a variety of skin colours, and still keep the softness of the baby.

I started as usual with a line drawing on a grid, straight onto the pastel paper. For this baby, I used white Art Spectrum Color Fix.

I decided the background would be a beautiful green, so I put some of it around the baby’s body and head, but I will do the rest at the end.

For the skin tones, I start with white, which I put under all the areas where there isn’t shadow.

The next step is to put all the darkest darks, which I do using a red and green combination, or a blueand orange one. If I can’t decide which one to use, I might reach for a Burnt Sienna, or a Raw Umber. They both work pretty well for dark areas. I can always go over them again later.

After the lightest lights and darkest darks have been placed, I block in the rest ofthe skin according to the values I find, using mostly a red and yellow, blended with a white. I add some green in areas of lighter shadows, and blue and red in areas where the skin looks purple.

By the time I took this photo, I’d obviously done quite a bit already, but because it’s basically only skin, it’s pretty much the same colours repeated over and over.

By the time I’ve covered the whole skin, I will have done a few layers already, and then it’s just a matter of going back and finding smaller shapes of colour or value that need to be added or changed. Iwork my way through the painting, back and forth, using those same colours, blending with white in between each layer until I’m happy with an area.

I keep working on the skin tones, the eyes and the mouth, and start adding more green to the background.

I work on the hair, and also change the skin on the forehead a bit, as I realised I’d brought the hair too far forward into the forehead.

I also go back to the skin tones, and work on them if I find areas that are too dark, or not showing enough contrast. I make sure the highlights that indicate the chubbyness of the baby are all there, otherwise I’ll lose the soft fleshy look of the baby.

After some more work on the skin tones and background, especially the forehead, and the hair, I ended by adding soft pink for the blanket, including some shadow areas to show the folds.

The baby is now done. Soft and sweet:-)