Christmas Portrait Commissions 2021 – My first commission of the festive season

Its that time of the year again, already! (Where did 2021 go??) It went by so fast and here we are in November once again! Christmas means the opening of my Christmas commissions and I’m going to be showing you the process of my first commission of the festive season in this blog post!

Photo Reference

I was commissioned by one of my regular clients to do an A4 drawing of his wife’s parents on their wedding day from years ago! As a Christmas gift for his wife. I haven’t done many drawings from too far in the past before so I was looking forward to working on something less modern.

WIP 1

Once I did my measurements and completed the outline of the drawing, I began by adding and shading the facial features. Due to it being a full body photo, the faces were a lot smaller than what I usually work on. I’ve drawn smaller faces before but it definitely takes a lot more precision to try and get it to look lifelike. I started by sketching and shading the mans face, and once I was satisfied with this, I moved on to the body. His face wasn’t finished yet, however I don’t usually like to finish one area at a time, but rather work back into it once I have begun on other areas.

WIP 2

As you can see here, I continued working on the man’s suit before beginning on the woman’s face. I left the leg on the right blank for now, sometimes I get bored/tired of working on one area and like to start another to switch things up! Its also good sometimes to get an idea of how the overall drawing will look before going in and darkening/refining areas and such. In the reference photo, their eyes were squinted and almost shut, I decided to open them both slightly in my drawing otherwise they would just look like slits! That’s the beauty of drawing, we can redesign and reimagine images any way we want.

WIP 3

Now, as you can see, I’ve darkened the mans face, hair and clothing a lot more, and worked more on the woman’s face. When I’m doing commissions, I keep my customers up to date with the drawing process by sending regular picture updates. At this point my client was very happy with how the drawing was coming along so far.

WIP 4

My client requested some colour be added in the drawing to bring it to life even more. As you can see in the reference photo, the image is black and white and that’s the only copy he had. So he had no idea what the original colours actually were, but we decided to improvise. He asked for the bouquet of flowers in her hands to be coloured with a light pink, as well as the horseshoe beneath it in a silver. He wanted some pink around the woman’s cheeks to give her some life. And he also wanted the mans suit to be coloured blue, as he was in the Navy and so thought it’d be very fitting. Here I began adding the colour.

WIP 5

This is how the suit looked once I had added all the blue and burnished it, and I must say my client was definitely right about adding colour to bring it to life. It really did make the image pop.

WIP 6

As a final request my client asked me to do an outline of purple around the couple to highlight them. I’ve never been requested to do something like that before so I was a tiny bit nervous to mess it up. Only a tiny bit nervous though as I believed I could do it and finish it off the way he wanted it.

FINAL RESULT

And here is the final result! My client was very happy with the outcome and has bought a frame to frame it in. He’ll surprise his wife with this drawing on Christmas day and he said he’d send me a video of her reaction when she opens it so I look forward to seeing that.

Christmas is always one of my favourite times to do commissions because it’s exciting and heart-warming to know that your drawing will be gifted to someone and hopefully bring them a lot of joy and happiness. It gives me a lot of motivation to make sure I draw to the best of my abilities and create something very special for my customer and whoever it’ll be gifted to.

How can I get a custom drawing?

I’m still taking Christmas commissions, and it’s super easy to get one!

If you press here you will be directed to my contact page, where you’ll see information on how to contact me directly! Please feel free to send me any enquiries through email or alternatively get in touch through any of my social media’s which you will find on that page also.

Click here to see more of the drawings and past commissions I have done

I’m open for commissions all year long so if you would like to place an order which is not for Christmas then you can still get in touch! 🙂

If you’re an aspiring artist whose looking for advice on how to get started, please feel free to check out my other blog posts including my post on Art and Self Doubt: How to build your confidence as an artist

#art #christmas #commissions #Drawing #RealismArt