Going through the photos from our wedding, I found one photo that screamed “Paint me!”

It was a ¾ length view of the two of us. However, when I zoomed in to just the faces, that is when it called to me.

I sketched it onto 11x14” canvas board. You can still see some of the yellow pencil grid lines I used to make the drawing. This is one of the first portraits in a long time that I drew free-hand without using a projector.

The first image is of the underpainting. I laid in basic shapes and values with a light touch. Then went over the layer with Res-N-Gel to smear to an even coating of color within each shape.

At first I put color down very similar to the underpainting. But there was such a large dark area on the left portrait that it felt like it needed something. So then I began scribbling on the range of colors shown below.

These added colors really started giving the faces some shape and liveliness.

There have been a lot of structural changes to both faces to get better likenesses. I’m sure there will be more as I go along. The mouths and eyes are being left for later.
The following 2 images are close-ups of the above photo.

The work continues…