Sophie: A Portrait Sketch

Here is the portrait sketch of Sophie that I did at KennedyArt a few weeks ago.

I added a bit of tone afterwards hoping to lose a lot of those edges along Sophie's cheek(the right one as we look at it).

Her colour is always a challenge to capture but my students all did a great job on the day.

I am very much looking forward to future workshops at KennedyArt.

The next two are on the 25th of January and the 15th February.

Contact Kennedy's for information about their workshops. ph  + 353 (1) 475 1749info@kennedyart.com  

And I will post details soon of a two day workshop that we will be doing in Cavan in the coming months.

Sophie's Back, Again

Happy New Year everyone, I hope you all had a great Christmas.
We had a lovely time, but I hope that all our Christmases won't be white in future. I really love the snow, but Ireland just isn't geared up to deal with such a lot of it.

This picture of Sophie may look familiar to some of you.
It's based on a painting I did at the life room last year, which I was never entirely happy with (see below).
For one thing Sophie's gorgeous natural colouring has always been a bit of a problem for me (I think I need to buy a few new paints just to tackle her hair). A second problem with the original picture is that the working drawing shows through in a very inelegant sort of way. I seemed to be using a lot of green back then, which just looks sickly to me now.
Nonetheless I liked the pose, and the light and the composition so I thought it might be worth doing a second version based on the first.


Creating more polished image based on sketches from the model was very much the modus operandi of many of my favourite painters of the past. However I am always worried that what you gain in polish, you loose in spontaneity.
I'd be very interested to hear what you think.

Two views of Sophie

I've posted this painting of a rear view of Sophie before, but I recently got a hold of a jpeg of the drawing that my friend Oisin Roche did from the opposite side of the model. It is always fascinating to see two artists' different approaches to the same subject, but this one is doubly interesting for me as Oisin included a pretty brilliant portrait of me in the background of his picture.

Madonna Sophie

I don't think I've posted this one of Sophie before.
With her hair down she has a lovely Renaissance Madonna look about her. We had a lot of nice drawings of her in the Life drawing session that day.
I returned to my painting later and added a background and a few glazes.
I'm always very wary of messing with a life painting after the fact, but this one has turned out OK.