Elizabeth Taylor

Dug this out of my languishing unfinished portraits and finished it, some two years after I began. It got put on hold for hectic third year uni, and then even more hectic honours year, plus I hurt my wrist, and have to be careful with the heavy colouring I use for portraits, so I pretty much gave them up for a while there. (half an hour at a time on portraits is my current limit, but I'm getting better!) But I'm back, squeezing the odd portrait in among my illustrations.

So here is Elizabeth Taylor in 1950, from a photo by A L "Whitey" Schafer. I'm not quite sure what's in the background, but whatever it is, it was pretty tedious!

There's a bit of postwork done in Photoshop, as something had happened to the paper, and it wouldn't blend as smoothly as usual, which was then exacerbated by the scanner - but this is pretty much what the original looks like.

Size: 33 x 26.5cm
Materials: 0.5 mechanical pencil with #B lead, #8B solid graphite pencil, plastic and kneadable erasers, tissues, cotton buds and blending stumps, postwork in Adobe Photoshop CS4
Reference From:Movie Star Portraits of the Forties, edited by John Kobal.

Enjoy!