[Chris Saper]

Dear Ron,

Welcome to the Forum!

As I look at both of your posts, there are a couple of things that stand out to me as areas you might want to look at initially. First, there is not a great deal of value delineation in your two paintings. If you clarify your dark, medium and light values, not only in the face, but in the hair, clothing and background, I think it will bring more cohesiveness to your drawing and to the overall piece.

The second thing I would mention is that, at least on my monitor, the color in the first painting is very greyed-down, without any areas of more saturated color to energize the surface's overall sense of color. Interestingly, in the second painting, the opposite happens - there is a great deal of equally highly saturated color, so in this case, the use of more desaturated hues will also help balance the overall feeling of color, and will support your center of interest.

It may also be that you are working from photos that are not strong reference pieces.

One of the most helpful things I think you might try is to work from life more, (and certainly to choose photgraphic resources that give good shadow and light information) and to use just three or values of a similar hue to force yourself into more clearly stating your values.

When you are working with a new medium it is so difficult to change all the variables at once! Working in this fashion will allow you to become familiar with the different types of pastels and how they behave on the paper, without confounding the experience with color right away. Then you can concentrate on values and their significance in creating likeness.

While the shape and placement of features is very important, the best likenesses, I think, are built on a three dimensional sense of the forms they sit on, which can only be as well-described as the values used to create them.

I hope this is helpful.

Kindest regards, Chris