James Flynn

Hello once again, I hope you have been well, and have been creative as usual....

I have been busy with the pastels once again, and I am still having fun with this great medium.

Tonal studies is my passion at the moment and I am always on the lookout for reference material. So when I found a classic photo of Audrey Hepburn in black and white, I just couldn't resist! I just had to paint it and add my little "spin" on things.

Apologies I have not got the reference photo to put up here, but I will show you my painting step by step.....

So, as always I started putting down the eyes. Nothing too fancy at this stage just getting some lights and darks down as you can see...

Next I start to refine the eyes slightly, and start to "mold" them into shape. I spend quite a lot of time around this area before moving on to the surrounding areas. This is to ensure that the measurements are correct before commiting to anything else.

As you can see here, I have now moved onto the nose and eyebrows, and I am starting to work outwards....

I have moved outwards further to the mouth now, and at this stage I am basically working around all these areas, adding bits here and there before moving outwards any further.

And onto the neck! A lot of filling in here, there was no way around it, so I just steamed into it, and got some black put down...

You can see I just started to put some hair in here....

Here I have started to put down some background. I decided to give this painting some of my "wild" energy that I like to put down. And I started to make some marks....

And finally the finished piece!....

I went a bit wild with the mark making but this is the effect I was going for. I decided to add some crimson red to give the painting a little something extra, and I think it worked.

So there it is, I hope you enjoyed seeing this as much as I enjoyed painting it, because I had a good time with this one!

As always, comments welcome, let me know what you think....

Thanks for reading.

James Flynn