This is a portrait of my son. He only gave me 40 minutes, so the underdrawing isn’t very strong and I would have liked more time to work on the pastels. I like the colours overall, but again struggle with the transitions between light and dark, and the transitions within the lights. I spent more time setting it up than I would normally do, made sure half of his face was facing the window (adding an additional light on that side), and also paid attention to resolving the edges and creating some angles in the overall composition to make it more interesting.

Portraiture in Oil Pastel with Samir Rakhmanov

This is a portrait of my son. He only gave me 40 minutes, so the underdrawing isn't very strong and I would have liked more time to work on the pastels. I like the colours overall, but again struggle with the transitions between light and dark, and the transitions within the lights. I spent more time setting it up than I would normally do, made sure half of his face was facing the window (adding an additional light on that side), and also paid attention to resolving the edges and creating some angles in the overall composition to make it more interesting.

Skills

Posted on

April 3, 2025

← I was much happier working at a bigger scale (this is about 50 x 40 cm). I also have some more oil pastels (treated myself to some from Sennelier) so I have more colours now. I still find I use them in a linear fashion though, rather than blobs of colour/splodges of paint like you do! This is obviously not a self portrait, but from a session from life in a very dark room! Painted from a reference photo of my son, photographed in afternoon light in front of a window. I tried to focus on using more chromatic colours in the shadow without losing the light/shadow relationship and also on trying to select colours a little more intuitively, hence this attempt being completed in less time. →

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