Drawing children's portraits - capturing the moment

The past couple of days have been busy – and I realized that it’s been a while since my last post. I do admire those bloggers who have a new post every single day. I must try harder to keep to more regular posting!

Below are two more portraits – the sleeping baby is only four weeks old – I’m sure most parents will remember looking at their sleeping infant will great fondness. A sleeping baby is a treasure, all too soon they are running around and then suddenly all grown up and going to school.

Sleeping Baby - 115mm x 165mm
Pencil on paper
Carol Lee Beckx ©2011

Little girl - 115mm x 165mm Pencil on paper
Carol Lee Beckx ©2011

This week I completed a number of small paintings and on Thursday, a double portrait of two little girls was delivered. I was fortunate to have a couple of really good images of the siblings to use for the portrait.

Often it is quite hard to get a photograph of two children together where both are in good positions for a drawing. Usually one has to use a combination of two or more photographs. The important factors to remember are that the scale and the light source of both images should be the same. Mechanical cropping and joining with a photographic programme is useful to a degree, but I find that it’s best to work out a complicated composition with some sketches to join the images together.

When photographing children, the window of opportunity for achieving a good image is small. Their interest wanes rapidly, and as they get older the desire to clown for the camera increases the longer the shoot continues. It’s best to catch children unaware before they realize that they are being photographed. Professional photographers have many tools that they employ when photographing children and their aim is to produce a formal photographic portrait. I prefer to work from more casual candid photographs for my children’s portraits – I like to use a relaxed pose that captures the essence of the child’s personality.

Do have a look at my  Pencil Portraits  for more about the portraits, and here on the  Portraits page on my website for more images.