A recently completed commissioned portrait project

The client wanted a surprise birthday present for his lovely wife. He proposed that I make a really colorful portrait of her!! (I know, how very sweet!! ). I was working on a tight deadline of just 4 days. And instead of taking a print and sending it by mail, I was going to e mail him a soft copy.

This made the project quiet unique. Sending out a soft copy has serious disadvantages. Selling of multiple prints without my knowledge was the biggest one. But, it had the advantage of being totally eco friendly or green. No gas burnt for shipping! Yay!!

I'm going to explore this business model further, in the later posts.

So here is my process, with lots of pictures.

This is the lovely wife and my subject.

I chose shades of brown and green with a dash of blue and red for the portrait.
I just love a riot of colors!

After the hair I drew out the eyes.
I use Wacom's pen tablet to sketch directly on my mac. And I love it to death!

Then I filled out the rest of her face and the other side of hair.

And then the neck and shoulders.
By this time the blue and green had started bothering me a little bit.
So I experimented with a new mostly red color palette.

It didn't pop out as much as I would have liked it to.
So off to the drawing board again.

I went back to the original face. Changed the eyes to a less scary brown, and turned the hair red.
Now it had the pop I was looking for.

The client like the last version too and printed out a large 60cm X 60cm poster!


And here is the very happy wife with her very own custom portrait.
A very satisfying project indeed. :)

More about no shipping business model in the next post.