Davi's Mama

My good buddy, Roch, has once again inspired me to paint from one of his wonderful photos. He and his family recently took a cruise on the Amazon! Rather than go with the ship-guided tours, he and his family chose to explore on their own and found many friendly villagers to guide them to see their ways of life.

When working on portraits, I like minimal lines since I don't like them to show through, but on this wonderfully wrinkled face I felt the need to establish some of the main wrinkles in the drawing. This was a difficult one to get on paper as so much of the face was in shadow so I had to suggest important elements in some places instead of having all the eyes, all the ears, etc. I found this to be more difficult than trying to get them portrayed accurately.  I normally will trace from the photo for portraits since it is so important to get the expression and features correct, but in this case the features did not show through the deep shadows well enough and I ended up drawing most of the facial features, just using tracing to do a few contour lines.


I know that this is difficult to see in this photo, but I will post WIP photos as I dive in and start defining the shadow areas.

This portrait will be done in sepia, monochromatically. I just love that face!