Here's BJ. A charming young boy, and a wonderful big brother, who always looks after his little brother with care. He tolerated my wish to paint him, being a modest lad, but gave in as It was going to make a good Mother's Day gift to give. I find the boys harder to convince to pose for me as they get older. The girls tend to love to pose for me. I used Painter Classic to do this portrait and my wacom tablets & pen. I took about 5 minutes only to touch this one up with my updated version Painter IX software. This was painted using photos for referrence only, so I'd remember details, such as eye color, etc. I started with a blank canvas/screen. I used layers of airbraush, pastels, and water to blend to get the soft look of this portrait. I like to use a scanned photo on a split screen so I can work on an area enlarged on one side of the screen, and the same area on the other on the canvas. That way I get that area accurate and get rid of any of the wierd looking pixels chunks or distortions you can have with computer works. If you manipulate and enlarge a work, you can often see this, as it can blur or distort, or have speckling/ or noise like graining areas. I like to enlarge my work and scroll over it all at the end of the work to blend that all out, if there is any to find. Unless I want a textured look, I blend with various sized brush tools to soften areas and smooth. It helps to lessen the brush strokes, and make more realistic skin surface, and less hay hair as well. YOu can blend with fine lines to pull out details like eyelashes, and individual hairs as well. I hope this helps answer a few queatons on my techniques. It's layers, blending, often more layers, and blending on top of it/ I usually only use one current layer screen, not a build of of layers. I am referring to layers of paint and pastles, chalks,etc. not screens to merge. I do frequent saves in case I want to revert back to an earlier stage of work. I find it faster for me to do this, and guess to much of a hassle to merge layers the other way. I can tell if I like what I'm doing, when I do it, and for this type work, don't need the merging type layers. Still learning to do the other merging type. (I'm so lazy at times.)I used some lighter skin tones and values on this one. BJ chose more pastels for his when helping to decide how he wanted his portrait.