Painting "Little Girl In Pink Satin"

​I finished “Little Girl In Pink Satin”! It’s an 11×14 acrylic on canvas. My reference photo is from Glennis Weston at Paint My Photo.

​Here’s a pic I asked my mom to take of me holding the painting. Thanks, Mom.

​This is my first painting of a small child and thus a challenging endeavor for me. I made a conscious effort to draw the girl’s face as accurately as possible. I used guidelines, drawing two diagonal parallel lines to make sure I got the tilt of her head right. As far as painting, my goal was to capture the glow on her face and the innocence of her expression and of course, the satinyness of her dress, hence the title. I was surprised how effective adding the pink into her cheeks was at accomplishing one of these goal. I’ve known I need to practice depicting children, and I’m hoping to be able to confidently offer commissions to paint custom portraits of them

I’ve utilized transparent mixing white as well as tiny touches of titanium white in her lips, hair and clothes, to create the look of shine. I’ve found this to be more effective than using mediums designed to make your painting look shiny. I had thought the center of her dress was solid yellow, but the next day, when I looked at, I noticed there was greyish pink and blue streaks of light going through it. When I added these streaks and blended them out with a mop brush, the dress looked much more luminous. If you want something to look radiant, it hardly ever works to paint it just one color.
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​I decided to do something I don’t normally do on paintings with a solid background like this and that’s put a shadow around the subject. This is to make it look more 3 dimensional.

That’s all for now. I’ll have another painting/drawing post for you next Monday.

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