A commissioned piece done in an impressionistic style with lots of clairobscur. I had to come up with a solution for depicting his pale skin hues and still rendering them too unsaturated. Therefor I placed hatched strokes of complementary colours next to eachother, to cause a graying effect. Through this process from a certain distance all lines converge into the right impression while still from nearby people can enjoy rich colour textures. It works the same way as pointillism but translated into hatched strokes rather than by dots. The hardest part though was to match the strokes not only colourwise but also tonally.

Click here to see the build-up of the pastel.

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

Artist: Corné Akkers