Okay, so I have this project I was working on and time just ran out so I had to give it to the person who asked me to draw it so she could have it for a Christmas present but I think I could probably do better and if I redo it soon enough maybe I could run over and give her a better version before it's too late. But I don't have the one titled "2nd attempt" anymore except on my computer.

Here's the project: My friend wanted me to draw her aunt and gave me about 20 pictures and said that she would like her to be wearing a certain shirt and have her dog in the pic as well.

I'm kindof new to this whole forum thing so bear with me while I try to share the reference photos and what I've done. Any advice would be greatly appreciated... I would love for this to look realistic. Even if I can't get a better copy to her I would still appreciate the advice so I can draw better portriats in the future.

This is the shirt
[attachmentid=8194]

This is the dog, bill.
[attachmentid=8195]

This is the reference picture I used in the "2nd attempt" pic
[attachmentid=8196]

And these are the reference pics for the first attempt
[attachmentid=8197][attachmentid=8198]

Here is the "2nd Attempt"
[attachmentid=8199]

And here is the first
[attachmentid=8200]

Thanks again.

Amy,

I would leave it at the first. I like the naive style and it immediately reminded me of British artist Alfred Daniels. He did a celebrity portrait of Charlie Dimmock (she is a TV gardener over there), on Rolf Harris' Star Portraits TV show. He always incorporates the person's pet into the prtrait and he uses a naive style too.

Have a look at it - go to www.starportraits.co.uk and go into series 1.

I think you should leave it at the first painting - but again it is just my opinion.

Sue

I agree with bigs. Stick to the first attempt, Amy. Also, in the 2nd attempt, it looks like the dog is in a chokehold.

Thank you both.

I sent an email to my friend today to see if she wanted to have the first picture I tried since everyone seems to like that one best. I'm still just really not happy with the way my color pictures are coming out. Very cartoony but I'm actually going for realistic.

These were done with colored pencils and on the original you can't see all those holes that you can see in the scan. I'm not sure why.

Thank you guys for being so supportive. Maybe I'm just expecting more from myself than I'm ready to do yet.

I think you're doing great. Color portraits are really hard. They take a lot of practice (note that I'm saying this as someone who hasn't succeeded with them, yet.) I saw in the drawing challenge that you took 45 minutes on that drawing, which is actually still really fast compared to what it takes to do something realistic-looking. Probably you just need to keep practicing and learn to go even more slowly. The "realistic" portraits I do in graphite take about six hours each; doing work at that same level of realism in CPs would take at least twice that long.

Ann Kullberg's books are wonderful and worth for more than their modest price -- if you can get her "Colored Pencil Portraits Step by Step", I guarantee you will love it beyond your wildest expectations.