Portrait of a Friend of Mine

I've been trying to work back slowly into this watercolor thing, and I like painting birds but.....I guess I just needed to do something a bit more.  

In addition to posting my artwork here, on my art blog site, I post to G+.  Somewhere on G+ I ran into a fellow artist and contributor named Kelly.  I didn't really wanna paint a picture of myself (tried it, bad subject matter that turned into a bad portrait), but I wanted to paint a portrait.  Kelly was gracious enough to allow me to paint a picture of her.  Two days later and this is what I came up with.

BTW, if you are interested in some good artwork and an uplifting look at life, check out her blog site.

So, I think I'm getting a little better with hair, though its a long slow process.  And I guess I can say the same about portraits in general.  Looking back at the first portraits I've done, I see some really rudimentary work.  This one, while not a Rembrandt by any stretch is miles ahead of what that one was.

I feel like I am not nearly as afraid to leave a hard edge on the paper.  I used to be afraid to do that and had to smooth all the edges before I could move on.  It made it an extremely long process to do anything.  Like probably 2 or 3 times as along to paint any given picture.  Yes, on this I did smooth a few edges out.  I didn't feel as though I should leave all hard edges, but a few weren't too bad.  It's a little unfortunate that I used the mixed media paper instead of watercolor paper because the water kept pooling and made it harder than I think it had to be.  But I just thought that with as hot as its been here, the watercolor paper would dry too fast.

Here is the picture I used as a reference.  I had a little trouble with the shadows in her hair on the right hand side of her head.  If I were to do this one agian, I would try to get that a bit better, but I'm happy with it.  I think the representation of Kelly is pretty good.  And what is more important is that when I sent this picture to her, she liked it.  In the end, I think that is more important than producing a great work of art.  I got the enjoyment of painting it, and she got the enjoyment of seeing it.  For me that's enough.

Hope you all enjoyed this as much as I did.  Enjoy.