Self Portrait in White Pastel on Black Paper

I don't do portraits often; of humans that is. But, after I finished this one of me I decided I would try  some more in this style, with these materials. Right now I'm finishing up a graphite drawing of grooming cockatoos because I'm always working but I've been going through old family photos and I thought I would use them to build a portfolio of portraits. 

But on to the project at hand which happened partly because I wanted to do something different (a portrait) and partly because, once again, as I said in my last post, color is getting in the way again. So I put away the pastels and the colored pencils and eliminated charcoal from my list of media (way too messy for me) and set aside the water soluble graphite because painting in a wet medium, however little water is involved, in any way just doesn't feel comfortable to me right now. I always feel good when I work on black paper with white pastels. 

I used white Pan Pastels, a white pastel pencil and a black pastel pencil on black Stonehenge watercolor paper to create this portrait. I had taken this selfie about five years ago and decided it would be a good project. I desaturated the image and used it as my reference photo.

I only took two photos of the process although there was a lot of build up and a great deal of tweaking. This is a photo I took of the face but it was far from completed.

And here I started to work on hat and scarf while making changes to the face. I don't remember how long this project took; maybe three hours. When I'm working, if I don't tape, I lose track of time.

And here is my completed piece. I worked a lot on my right eye, the one behind the bangs to make it just dark enough not to be too visible but not to be too light as to through off the balance of the work. The nose was off as well; a little low on the shadow side so it needed to be raised. And I worked on the light and shadow continually to get it just right. Then I started to run out of tooth and I had to stop. Working on cap and scarf was a bit of a challenge since this sort of detail isn't my strong suit and a reason I will never be a photorealist artist. But I achieved the softness I wanted and enough detail to indicate knitted clothing. As I said, I'll never be a photorealist.