For this piece, I was doing my own interpretation of Hansel and Gretel. I used oil pastel, which didn't work out very well because oil pastel dries after a while and so you cant make any corrections. I didn't know this until I did this piece, so the face has some nasty splotches where I tried to go back and correct it. Another annoying thing is that oil pastel attracts stuff, so little pieces of different colored pastel gets stuck to it; luckily, though, you can't tell unless you look more closely. Overall, I tried to use the dark, hot color scheme to indicate that Hansel and Gretel's surroundings were malignant nad evil, while making them brighter to provide contrast and draw the viewer's eye to their faces, especially Gretel's eyes, since they don't adhere to the color scheme. Some techniques I used in this were smearing the oil pastel, as I did with the background and the shirts, and doing layers of oil pastel starting with light colors and then adding dark and scraping off parts of the dark layers to get texture, like in the hair and eyes.
The idea for this piece was to do a portrait (with Jourdan as my model) while showing another view of Hansel and Gretel. This fairy tale was written to admonish the hardships of medeival life, when many families couldn't get by, much less take care of children, so sometimes families would leave their children in the woods to die. In my version, instead of being the victims of their times, Hansel and Gretel wanted to get lost, realizing that their world was not where they wanted to be living and deciding to take a risk and lead their own lives.
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