This started out as a demo in my Aboriginal Art class. One of my beginner students wanted to do a portrait of her deceased mother from a photo. When she got frustrated and gave up I tried to get her interested again by showing her how to handle the pastels. But she just looked at it and said: 'yeah, that's good, you can finish it off'. And she started another less ambitious project.
Now I don't usually do drawings for individual students in case I get them lining up at the door for A1 portraits of their rellies, which of course are usually large in number! But this meant a lot to her. She obviously really loved and missed her mother. So while my students were working on projects of their own, I kept at it. Each week my student would smile and ask 'have you got that picture finished yet'. She knew she was being quite cheeky and I let her know it. But today I finally finished it.
My students don't often thank me, so it was nice to be thanked several times for this. My student already has orders for copies, which luckily will be done digitally, because someone took a photo of it and it has been circulating for weeks. As she left today I said laughing 'now don't you go bringing in all those rellies to get a portrait from me!'
They really crack me up. Some days we have such a lot of fun.
