Custom Portraits Online by Miranda Aschenbrenner

Hi folks! Yes, it’s that time again. I am now officially taking commissions for the Christmas season. It’s importrant to get your orders in early this year. I am off on my honeymoon in December and won’t have much time last minute. The end of November will be your last chance to get a portrait in time for the holidays. Don’t wait too long, you have just over a month!

This portrait is nearly finished, I just have a few tiny details to add. This is Chani and her son, winner of my portrait giveaway back in November. Later this week I will be shipping this drawing across the world all the way to France!

Chani’s portrait is coming along; I anticipate finishing it up this weekend. Here I have done most of the shading on Chani’s and her son’s face, as well as her son’s jacket. The shading actually involves three layers. One with a hard pencil to map out the values, a second with a softer pencil to get the mid-tones of the skin, and a third in an even softer pencil to get the shadows. It’s this gradation from light to dark that creates the illusion of three dimensions.

You may be wondering what happened to my portrait giveaway that happened nearly two months ago. Well, here’s an update!

Chani, a lovely woman from Paris, was the winner of a free 5×7″ pencil portrait. She sent me a picture of her and her adorable son, but by that time I was deep into Christmas commissions. She kindly agreed to wait until January for her picture.

Here is the preliminary line drawing for Chani’s portrait. Each of my drawings start out this way as a map for the shading. In some ways, this is the most important part of the portrait. If the lines are even a millimeter off, it can throw the whole thing off track!

This will be the third piece of mine that has made it overseas, the first two being a small drawing and painting that went home with my fiance’s best friend.

Race Car Portrait, 7×5″, Ink

This piece isn’t a commission, it’s one of my own side projects. This was a Christmas gift for my fiance’s step-father. What do you get the guy who has everything? Art!

This is Ron’s race car, which he’s been driving for about two years now. It’s a dwarf car, which makes it just big enough to fit into. They are really fun to watch on the race track because they do a lot of weaving in and out.

As far as I’m concerned, portraits aren’t strictly people’s faces; portraits can be of animals, houses and yes, cars!

I decided to do this piece in pen. I used a cross hatch method, which means that I used many little tiny, overlapping lines to create shading. Then I layered some coloured pencil on top. The trick with working in ink is really avoiding the areas you want to be lighter. There’s no erasing!