Navajo Boy

2025 – A 24″ x 18″ pastel drawing of a Navajo child wrapped in a blanket. Using a limited color palette along with toned paper creates consistency and helps me focus more on the figure and small details rather than color harmony.

I wanted to practice using pastel pencils more since I have seen an artist numerous times get extreme detail with them, yet create these soft backgrounds and extreme darks. Just like charcoal, pastel can be challenging to control, and I wanted to get better so that the medium won’t feel like such a task in the future.

The original art I referenced was one of the many children that Edward S. Curtis photographed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.