When drawing directly from life, there is a higher likelihood of getting proportions wrong. Here’s why keeping art at least a few days before delivering it up is prudent. Below see the sketch as completed. The next day I realized what needed changed.  Go ahead and compare.

What threw me off was her enormous head of hair and the fat slippers. The hair made me instinctively draw the face larger. The slippers were replaced with thin moccasins. Her dad pointed out her nose. That was the start point. Her nose is perfection for a girl, so I had a closer look at the image and made changes. The second picture is the corrected one.

Larissa sat on a chair in her room with only the ceiling light for our illumination, positioned as close to the door as possible so as to cut down on shadows. During each break she had more ideas to make it a fun sketch. It was her plan to do an Indian theme, signaled by the design in the blanket. So she took her hair down. Then it was very fluffy, so her mom gave us the pony tails. The dream catcher was the point of her focus and she asked me to add dream catcher ear rings and feathers in her hair. She also wanted owls. A chair would be inconsistent so she asked for a log. For some reason, she wanted an owl. When I think of owls, I think of grumpy cat. They’re interesting creatures. My youngest daughter is an owl fan and I did a sketch for her apartment that represents all the members of her household with owls. I decided to go with that friendly depiction or similar. So she got little puff ball owls.

Next she wanted a horse. It would be a tan gray with little speckles of dark with braided mane.

I looked for a long time for horse photos that would allow me to sketch her horse, whose name I keep forgetting. I remember it as “midnight’ but that’s probably not correct. It would have to be nuzzling her. That didn’t pan out so I imagined the horse in the distance in the clearing on the left between her and the dream catcher so I set up the large correctly proportioned toy horse that Leah used as a guide for her horse sculpture but that didn’t work the way I wanted either. When I did come up with a view I liked, it was positioned such that I thought someone somewhere would think it was walking on the log and therefore all wrong size wise. So I added that limb to establish that the horse was in the distance. I swapped the fluffy slippers for beaded moccasins. As I was about to add tree leaves and other foliage I came to my senses and stopped.

Now here’s an irony. I printed the revised image and delivered it within hours. So much for waiting.