Creating Manon - 11-10-19

Website link: https://corneakkers.com/manon-11-10-19-sold/

The Last One

This pastel drawing ‘Manon - 11-10-19 (Sold) is a commissionary piece. The last of three pastels of two sisters and a brother. The first was ‘Laura – 01-04-15 (Sold)’ and the second ‘Wouter – 08-11-17 (Sold)’. Their mother wanted to have them eternalized at age 8, I believe. So this was the last one. All three rendered in the same style. The latter would be my personal one: a kind of impressionism hatched strokes. For another more recent example please click ‘Portrait of Princess Wilhelmina (Tribute to Thérèse Schwartze) – 23-08-24’. Nowadays I hardly accept commissions anymore, mainly focusing on my own themes. The fun part though is to handle a theme I normally don’t touch upon. Pets, horses and little children these would be. But why not? Once in a while at least.

Blonde Hair

The young girl has beautiful natural blonde hair, alabaster skin and blue eyes. It goes without saying that it was senseless to put her in full daylight. Therefor I let her sit for me ‘contrejour’. The light then would come from behind and be shattered through her blonde hair. Almost like through a prisma. This way I could see beautiful color shifts: from purple to green. I played an old pointillistic trick to put yellow and lavender pastel strokes next to eachother in the locks. Such complementary effect shows the right luministic nature of the light. Blending pastel patches would only create less vibrancy. The latter I can only create by using white strokes only. My own personal annotation to the doctrine of divisionism. Quite different than from the color theory as practised by pointillists like Seurat. However the principle of colors blending at a distance remains the same.

Pastel drawing on Canson Mi-Teintes Touch paper (50 x 65 x 0.1 cm)
Artist: Corné Akkers