...color on hold

I've made the decision to not accept color pencil portrait commissions for awhile. How long? "Until further notice" is the best date I can come up with! The good news is:
I will still do black and white graphite pencil portrait commissions.

I have come to this decision because I need to develop more colored pencil portrait skills, especially for people portraits. It doesn't make good business sense to market and sell something when I feel it's not up to my standards for my art, and I have pretty high standards I think. Creating a color pencil portrait requres a lot of time. Skin tone doesn't just come from one pencil, it has to come from about 10-12 pencils, and they have to be overlaid slowly and blended carefully. I love it, but it is really slow going.

It takes a ton of labor time for any artist, but because I have a 15 month old getting into everything, and a 3 year old and two 13 year olds needing a lot of attention, I just don't feel that I can give the color pencil drawings the attention they deserve. Portraiture will wait, but my kids won't...they keep growing and learning and I'd like to be there.

And, just like any company that decides to hold off on a product line in order to make it better, I hope to develop better colored pencil portraiture skills in the meantime. If any prior clients need a color pencil portrait to 'match' an earlier portrait they had done by me, and my current colored pencil commissions...of course I will help them with that, but for new commissions..no color please.

I put a notice about this on the pages of my website that have colored pencil drawings on them.