People portraits

Click thumbnails to view larger images in a new window.

Watercolour portraitPastel portrait
Watercolour portraitPastel portraitWatercolour

All images on this page were commissioned subjects.

The mediums shown are (left to right, top to bottom): watercolour, pastel, watercolour, pastel, watercolour.

The day-to-day difficulty with people portrait commissions is the poor quality of photographs that customers often submit. That's not to say that I need studio photos to work from (far from it), but I do need to be able to see the detail of a face. I cannot use guess-work to make-up the missing information; the result would be a portrait of an imagined person, who may be quite different from the subject.

To avoid your disappointment, and my effort for nothing, I do not take-on commissions where the reference photo is "newspaper" quality (tiny, blurry, or both).

Check my "taking (and selecting) photos" page for more details of what's good, and what isn't.