High winds, great conker stash!

Just look at all these beauties. The strong winds today have resulted in hundreds of conkers. My boys couldn't believe their luck! We collected a mountain of conkers in 10 minutes. My friend informs me that if you put a conker in the corner of your room it will keep away the spiders, sounds crazy, but I've plently of conkers so may try this one out. Another strange piece of advice given to me this week was to put Vicks vapour rub on your kids feet, then put their socks on, apparently this will stop a night-time cough! Not so sure about trying this one!

A Quiet Moment w.i.p., day 2

Had a very busy day today, so unfortunately the progress on this has been limited. I'm still using mainly conte pastel (hard), as I've worked mostly on the stone steps. Have started to introduce some colour, generally experimenting with the palette I want to use. I think I want to keep it simple.
The steps are making me feel sea-sick when I look at them on this photo, so I guess the perspective still requires some work! Next I'm going to consider the drawing of my son, then get stuck into the water. I'm leaving the water to last as I think I will need lots of soft pastels, so don't want to have to lean my hand on them to work on other areas of the drawing. At some point I will have to go for it, so I can see how the drawing works as a whole.

A quiet moment... w.i.p. day 1

This one I think is going to challenge me. Its a totally self indulgent piece.I love the lighting on the steps, the ripples on the water of the fountain, and the little boy is my son, so it goes without saying I love the subject too!
I've sketched out the composition with conte. The perspective of the steps I found challenging, hope I get it right as its so key to the composition. Looking forward to doing the water, it has some beautiful movement in it, just hope I have the skill to capture it!

Summer's Day, Finished

Finished today, put the detail of the shirts in, and played around with the contrasts. I would have liked to achieved brighter highlights in the hair, but unable to get the pastel to build up any further. I guess tooth overload!

Summer's Day, Work in Progress

Haven't really had any time to do anything to this since the weekend. Spent some time today starting to consider the textures on the hats. I've taken the opposite approach to my previous pastels, using soft pastels fairly early on, then working finer detail with conte pastels(hard). This approach has been fairly successful, however struggling to achieve the highlights on the blonde hair.

My first pastel portrait commission

This is my first commissioned pastel portrait. Just had a lovely email from the boys' mum, she's really pleased with it. They were great to draw so expressive, doing so much with their hands!

Monkey business

I've been playing.....

Love the shapes of this, definitely worth a ponder.....