Not your everyday colored pencil portrait!

I love this piece. I really do. It's weird and strange and different. I get that. And for some, they won't get that. But that's okay, cause I really like how this portrait turned out and since I'm the artist, I get to decide if it was successful.

So how did I create this piece? Well, I took the picture of Kylie. She LOVES to pose for the camera. Try to get a straight and simple picture of her, she refuses, but ask her to do a silly face or a crazy face or something fun, and she is all over it!

Then I printed the piece in black and white with a posterized effect.

Then I drew it. Then I colored it with colored pencil. I used four shades of color pencil, all were shades of orange plus white. While i started this on watercolor paper that was white, I knew that for the effect to work, I had to color the white areas white.

After laying down a lot of layers of colored pencil, I painted India ink on the back side,

 Then flipped it over and did the same to the front. Yep, you paint over the ENTIRE picture. This is always a scary part. At this point you are praying that you burnished your colored pencil really well!

Then I took the piece over to my art sink and ran water over it to get the ink off her face.  Then blot dry and done.

I did go back over her face with a paper towel and some germx (that was what was on the counter..) and made sure that the ink was off the face.  But other than that, you get what you get when painting ink over colored pencil.

Here it is on the drying rack.

I enjoyed this process that I am working on another one. So far it is NOT as successful. Grr. The problem is that I tried to lay oil pastel over the colored pencil and ink and now its curing weird. It may be a total loss... or not, I'll just keep working it and see.  But any time you experiment, you run the risk of the piece not turning out the way you wanted. It's worth it though cause sometimes the piece is turns out better than you expected.. kinda like this portrait of Kylie!