Anniversary Celebration Pastel Portrait

A black and white commissioned portrait produced from an old photograph to celebrate a couples Golden Wedding Anniversary.

The painting was to be produced in soft pastel sticks on a 70cm by 50cm Pastlemat paper then framed with double matting and a battleship grey frame.

A request from the client was to keep the arm in the picture as without the couple looked further apart from each other. The arm unfortunately was too low resulting in their faces being too small to call a 'portrait'. The solution was just to squeeze the couple closer together.

I only had a copy of the original photograph taken by mobile phone. I ran the image through enlarging software, colour corrected and output on the studio printer. Working 'flat' with my reference image is more comfortable than looking at the image on a monitor.