"The Violinist" - original charcoal and oil pastel portrait drawing

Totally loved doing this drawing, beginning with vine charcoal
and then moving to Caran d'Ache oil pastel.  The (unsuspecting) model was in a quartet I was lucky to see and being close to the musicians, I zeroed in on this violinist. It's totally a memory drawing, but I think really pretty accurate.  I love drawing musicians as much as I love drawing dancers.  Gotta have music to dance, right?  The support for this piece is the carton board (carton is supposed to have an accent over the "o" but I don't know how to do it) from Guerrilla Painters.  I love this stuff.  It's great for oil pastel, charcoal, oil, acrylic and others, too, I'm sure.  If I use it for oil, I use clear gesso so I don't lose the beautiful color, which would happen if I used regular gesso.  With oil pastel, I just draw directly on the paper since OP contains a different type of oil that won't damage the support.  And the carton will then be bonded to museum board for extra strength.  Thanks for stopping by!

 

Portrait of Laura - original charcoal portrait

 I was so lucky to see the exhibition "Degas at the Opera" when it was in Paris and while my model perused the catalog from that fabulous exhibition, I did a sketch of her.  This drawing was done using vine charcoal on Canson Mix Media 12 x 9" paper, 138 lb, so a good weight.  Would liked to have had more time for this drawing but was glad to have even this much - thank you for stopping by!  

Preparatory Sketch for a Portrait - original charcoal portrait sketch

I was going

through some old sketches and came across this study that I did for a small portrait painting years ago.  I used vine charcoal (my fave) on 12 x 9" toned paper.  It's a lot of fun to look back at artwork from the past.  Thanks for stopping by!