More drawing - Flowers for Mom

When my son was a little boy, he was always picking flowers for me. It's one of my tenderest memories of motherhood.  For one Mother's Day, Ron bought me a figurine of a little boy looking up at his mother with a bouquet of flowers in his hands.  I'm looking at that figurine right now - on the shelf across from my recliner here in our great room.  Just looking at the figurine makes me smile with all the sweet memories of flowers - little dandelions in a muddy fist, stinky marigolds, wild daisies, Queen Anne's lace - and roses.  Whenever Joey saw flowers, he wanted to pick some for me.  And I always put them in a vase with water on the table so we could all admire them. 



I took a photo of Joey holding a bouquet of roses he'd picked for me - long ago when we lived in Matthews, N.C., and Joey was a little boy.  It was probably around 1982.  I had a rose garden at the time, and he had picked a bouquet of multi-colored roses for me.  Maybe that's where my love for multi-color rose bouquets came from.  My least favorite roses are a bouquet of red roses.  They're just so . . . ordinary. No imagination or knowledge of what I like is necessary for a bouquet of red roses.  Blah.  A bouquet of yellow roses is better. I've always loved yellow roses.  However, a bouquet of multi-colored roses is best of all.

Here is the photo of Joey with the rose bouquet for me.  It's black and white - but you can see that the roses are different colors.  I love his little chubby cheeks, and his fingers wrapped around the rose stems.

Last night I started sketching from that photograph, and here are the results of that effort.  The last one is okay - it is clearly a little boy with a bouquet of flowers.  However, it isn't Joey, in particular.  I need to study the photo more closely to see what unique shadows and highlights I can add to make my drawing clearly Joey.  I want to paint this soon.  I want it very impressionistic - with the background faded and blurry - with the focus being that precious face with the roses.

Here's the first attempt.  The head isn't bowed down looking at the roses. 

So I tried a second time.  This one is better, but still I don't have his eyes looking down at the roses.

My third attempt - I have him looking down.  The head is a little disproportionate, but it's not an altogether awful drawing.  But what can I do to make it clearly Joey - and not just a random little boy?

So that will be my goal - to really study the photograph, and to keep sketching until I get it figured out.  And yes, drawing DEFINITELY is a helpful step for pre-painting.  If I can get the face right, the rest will be fairly simple.