Smile

As I have noted before, I feel that portraits always carry an element of risk for the artist. Even a pleasing picture can fail because of a lack of “likeness”, particularly if the subject is well known to the general public. The risk in this case is slightly different, as this particular smile belongs to my better half! She was clearly happy when I took this photo whilst we were at a wedding last weekend, and much to my relief she seems quite relaxed about this drawing too.

As with a number of recent drawings, this was done using a drawing app on my iPad. The likeness is helped greatly by being able to trace the key outlines of the face with the pen – which I still sometimes think is cheating, but I do it anyway. I also seem to have fallen into a habit of using a very plain background, but visually I think it works so why not?