charcoal portraits

This is my first attempt in charcoal. And the subject is not a celebrity, I just found the expression interesting and doodled it. ;)

kid sketch

This cool guy is my neighbor.  I tried to do his portrait, asked him to stay still for just 15 mins. Kids are really good subjects with full of happiness and energy! But its really hard to make them stay still, staring at something doing nothing. This guy was so restless and finally photographed him maintaining the angle I started with. This was the final result. :)

Aparna nair

This was my second attempt in charcoal. I'm finally falling in love with this medium as this gives that extra dark strokes with ease.  The trade-off here is smudging of the medium which is more when compared to pencils.  Hope this can be fixed with a decent fixative! needs to do some more research on that though.

colleague sketch

For me making portraiture becomes easier when I'm in that creative spike where I don't feel any hesitation to make graphite marks on paper! being in sync with the subject also matters to a great extend.  This piece of work came out of urgency, she gave me a deadline of 12 hrs. In fact I wanted to do it better which would've eaten up couple of hours, but sometimes things done in a hurry brings out appreciable results!. What do you say?

temple pond

This was a wet on wet study on one of my favorite cool subject - "ambalakkulam".  As I do for most of my works, was very much concerned about the result. But with that thought in mind it took much longer than expected.  This work was on my easel for long - unfinished.  Just changing the mindset from being result oriented to 'enjoy the process of doing it' helped me signing it in this shape :)

sketch

This is another leaf from my sketchbook. The reference pic is of an unknown girl whom looked interesting. She just swept me off my feet.  Rest of it came out just involuntarily.