Mother and Dad – The Finished Product

Presenting the completed portrait of my parents: Nancy (born 09 April 1943 – passed 24 September 2018… RIP) and David (born 20 April 1941), who were married 21 July 1961.

I’m finally as equally satisfied with Dad’s portrait as with Mother’s. As I stated on one of the previous shares, I changed the shrubbery behind mother in the photograph to yellow roses in the drawing because they were her favorite. I added the yellow daisies below my father’s elbow because daisies are kind of my signature thing in my artwork. I tweaked another detail: A climbing vine grows from mother’s roses behind her, up and across the top of the arch, while another vine grows up the wall behind my father, reaching toward mother’s vine – This is intended to symbolize them always reaching toward each other and the love they shared.

This drawing was a labor of love for Dad, as a Christmas gift for his first Christmas after Mother passed in September 2018.

Completed January 2019, by D. Denise Dianaty

The drawing is done in heavily layered colored pencil on 11x14 illustration board, with a wash technique applied to smooth the color and to completely fill the surface with color, as well as to create a painted effect. In some places, I dissolved white colored pencil to make watercolor paint, and painted it over the dry colored pencil – for example, this is the technique I used to get Mother’s skin just right. The finishing detail was the bright gold acrylic ink applied for their glasses and the decorative swirls on Mother’s dress – It’s not readily apparent in this photograph of the drawing, but the gold ink is bright and shiny and catches the light… just as Mother would have loved it to be.

Below is the photograph from which I was working and the images of each of the stages I shared as work on the portrait progressed.

     

     

     

     

The combination of layering color, smudging, and applying the wash really fills in and smooths the color application process. It does use quite a lot of art product – I’ve gone through three entire white pencils and two black ones, plus most of an indigo blue pencil. To start this project, I purchased the pad of illustration board (20 pieces in the pad), a box of white pencils, 3 pale flesh tone pencils, fixative, drafting tape, smudgers (pack of six of varying sizes/thicknesses – I used 2), and gold acrylic liquid paint, all for $90±. I had all the other supplies in my possession. All told, the one drawing, including the other supplies I had, and factoring what I didn’t use of the new supplies, the material cost of this project is around $75. My time amounted to probably 60± hours. Even at minimum wage ($7.25/hour in NC, USA), without charging for supplies, that puts a low-ball of $435 price tag on the piece – again, that doesn’t factor in supplies or framing. For a colored pencil drawing, I doubt I could even expect $200 for an unframed finished piece. See… this is why we’re starving artists. [sigh]

I made a silly mistake when I signed the drawing and painted the year as 2018, instead of 2019. Ah well… I cannot do anything about it now because Dad already left it with the framers.