Building the layers (az)

  As I thought of my artistic process in creating this piece, it made me think of 

archaeology - carefully digging through the layers of dust and dirt.

Except I am building (as opposed to excavating) up layers over time with pastels, graphite, fixative and telling an artistic history. 

Over a decade ago, I took a portrait class.  In the fall of 2014, I dug out this pastel from the class and I started to rework it. Parts of the face were not lined up so I corrected what I could.  I wanted more detail than I could get with pastels, so pencil was used for more graphic lines. Recently, I found it again and proceeded to work on it with more pastel, pencil and fixative. I usually do not like it when the mistakes and lines show through the pastels and fixative but with this work I do. To me the layers of the work are the most fascinating and the layers tell story.

It still is not done. The story continues.