Vodniciar Alina Artwork Children’s Portraits «The Mother with her children» — 46x61cm colored pencils on drawing paper 2023

This Portrait of a Mother with Children was drawn in the winter of 2023. The lady who commissioned it came with a folder containing two photographs and asked me to create her Portrait separately, and in another Artwork, to create a Family Portrait in which this lady would be together with her young children. It required more effort for me to accurately represent this lady’s head position and the angle of its inclination because she is holding it tilted downward, and I had to be very careful not to create any distortion in the drawing. I drew this family scene of a Mother with her children, placing emphasis on the emotional connection between the mother and the children, capturing the closeness, tenderness, and peacefulness of the moment. It was important for me to represent the natural expressions of each person, paying particular attention to the eyes, the gestures of the hands, and the positions of the bodies in order to preserve the authenticity of the original photograph. When I constructed the Portrait composition, I aimed to preserve the natural balance of the scene, so that the Mother and children would appear in a real moment of closeness and affection. Then, when I moved to the stage of rendering the faces, I carefully combined graphite pencil drawing with subtle touches of color in order to express the warmth of the skin, the delicacy of the faces, and the intimate atmosphere of this family memory. I am also a Mother, which is why, through this Drawing, I wanted to create an authentic Artwork rendered artistically, one that clearly preserves the emotion and personal value of that unique moment between a Mother and her children. In the portraits of these children, I had a special concern for preserving their naturalness. I expressed their emotions through drawing without exaggeration — their smiles, their gazes, and their gestures. This is, in fact, one of the main challenges of realistic Portraiture: achieving a true resemblance to the person being drawn while preserving the living expression, because the most important aspect is that the subject must truly resemble the original model. When I finished the Drawing, I sent a photograph of it to the lady who commissioned it. Then, when she came to collect the completed Artwork, she told me that her mother’s eyes filled with tears when she saw the drawing of her grandchildren. Since this Portrait represents two children, this Drawing belongs to the category of Children’s Portraits, which is the 3rd type of Portrait that I draw or paint on commission from photographs in a large format. It includes the drawing of the hands and, sometimes, even the representation of the child’s entire figure. The price is determined according to the number of people represented and the complexity of the proposed subject.