Here is the step-by-step demonstration for this painting. I used sanded paper for this painting, because I love the thickness and the surface's texture of it. For me, sanded paper is best for pastel users, the only tricky thing when you over blending or put down too much pastel on the surface, the sand might fall off. To prevent this, you need to have a vision for your painting, and what it should look like. You can also use Pastel Fixatif while you're painting, just need to let it dry out before you continue working on your painting.

Thuy Nhu is my niece, and she was about 8 years old when I did this painting for her. She's very shy, quiet girl, and her face is pretty. To catch her personality, I asked her to wear a white hat and simple white dress. Her hair was braided like a Chinese girl's hair style... and finally, I had found the look which I wanted to paint from her.

1. I used pastel pencil to sketch, just simply a few lines to make sure I got her head composition right. At this point, I didn't worry much about details, just the shapes of her head, hat and shoulder.

2. When I was happy with my sketch, I blocked the background with green, dark brown and orange. I used the side of the pastel stick to paint, so the strokes were thicker and loose.

3. To paint her skin tone color, I used green as under painting color. Don't be afraid of colors, because our skin tone is not just brown and red and yellow. There are lots of colors under neat of our skin, like green, blue, and purple. In this painting, her skin tone colors were dark brown, orange, light yellow, light pink, and blue.

4. To blend, I used my fingers. As I mentioned before, don't over blend your pastel. In this case, I just slightly blended colors, enough to smooth her face, but you can still see the strokes. At this point, I focused on details on her eyes, and highlight on her nose and lips. It took me 5 hours to finish this painting. This painting was chosenfor a Juried Exhibition at Chablis Gallery, Placerville, CA in 2003.

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