Necla in Pastel

t the moment I try to do some portraits. The most difficult part of portrait painting for me is to reach the similarity to the person you are painting. You can read about the general outline of faces and figures, you can draw the outline of the faces and still do not get the similarity you want. To my opinion the most important features of a portrait and the similarity is to get the light and shadows in a face right. If these are correct you can identify the person.

These paintings were done on watercolor paper. After sketching the outlines I did a watercolor underpainting of the subjects. This underpainting gives a general color scheme to establish the mood of the picture. After the color was dry again I continued with the application of pastel and followed the value scheme of the underpainting. In this way you still have the possibility to change the colors the way you want.

Thunderstorm coming

This painting relies very much on the presentation of the thunderstorm cloud. This could be done nicely in oil or acrylics, but at the moment i am interested in pastel painting and tried to capture the mood of the coming thunderstorm in this work. The landscape is around Munich and I personally experienced this thunderstorm during a bike ride. To remember the scene, I took a photo with my smart phone camera and altered the scene to give a nice composition.