Not Forgotten

Here's a look at this oldie. I've picked up the pace recently with some work to the sweater area. I worked slowly over a long period on the foliage on the right. It was pretty tedious, but I'm liking how it looks. As I continued to work on the side area I realized that I should probably switch back to the center of the paper otherwise I would have to reach over the finished edge to access the center. So its back to red, red and more red.
 

Finished

The last section, work on the leather jacket is done. It took a lot of layering and different colors to get the look of leather I wanted. It was even more time consuming than usual because I couldn't just layer even coats of different colors on top of one another. To get the textured look of leather I had to add the different colors in scrumbling lines and small dots of color.


This is how it looked after laying out some basic colors while I tried to block out the areas of shadow and light.


After many more colors and lots of scribbling the colors and textures were solid enough to sign it and consider it done.

In this close up the grain of the paper is very aparent, but blots of colors can also be seen on the leather jacket as opposed to the smoother colors on the shirt. I did my best to cover the yellow of the paper so as to make the color of the jacket a cool brown with blueish highlights.

My final thoughts on this project are, love the paper and will definitely use it again. Small projects are nice, I actually finish them. Need to stop drawing television characters and draw something I can enter in a show.

Another Portrait

I couldn't resist starting another portrait (yes I know!). I wanted to work on Canson Mi Tientes again, so I used an 18 x 12 sheet from a Canson Pad I had. Fortunately for me at 12 inches wide it's small enough to put through my large format Epson printer. So I was able to print the contour lines directly to the paper.



I actually printed the lines twice when I realized the first try was too faint and some of my reference lines were not visible. I tried again printing it darker and most of the lines showed up. The double printing is what gives the vibrating effect in some places :-)








I'm off to a fast start!

One Jacket Done

Here is my latest work on this piece. I guess the most interesting thing while working on the jacket was trying to get the zippers on the pockets and front to look metallic. The color I found most useful was Prismacolor's Bronze. I used it in the darker areas and its brownish, greenish, yellowish tones seemed to help to convey the idea of the shadows in the gold colored metal.

There are darker colors I used like Sepia in the darkest lines and some dark browns sparingly. Some of the other colors were Burnt Sienna and Sand, both Prisma's, for the golden glints. For highlights, my favorite bright, Luminance Buff Titanium and small touches of pure white.



There's also some use of Luminance's Olive Brown 10% and Raw Umber 10% on the left side zipper pull. I tried the stronger Olive Brown 50% in the darks here but I think this went a little too much into the greens for my taste.

I do love that Luminance has a few sets of pencil hues in graduated tints, Brown Ochre, Burnt Sienna, Olive Brown, Raw Umber Burnt Ochre and Sepia. All these colors come in full strength, 50% and 10%. Some of them have been very useful to me for creating subtle changes in skintones.

Moving Along

I've spent the last week or so darkening the background, fiddling with Sam's hair and finally starting on the his jacket.


Here are two closeup progress shots I took when I was working on Sam's face. It just seemed to me that something looked off in the first shot. When I carefully studied the reference photo, I realized that I hadn't brought his hair out enough on the left side and it also seemed to be missing a little height.








Making some slight changes to the hair proportions made it look better to me and I moved forward. I wanted the make the hair color a little more like the reference picture which seemed to have a cooler light falling on it. My colors had too much warm browns and yellows in it. So I went looking for some pencil colors that might do the trick.

I ended up using the Prisma Ginger Root and Luminance Buff Titanium for the hair highlights. I put these down over the previous colors basically covering up the yellows there from before, as well as what I could cover from the yellows in the paper that was still showing through.

I also looked for cooler browns and midtones to darken the shadows and to darken the hair color in general. I used Coloursoft Black Brown and Brown for the darkest values and Prisma Bronze and Sandbar Brown for the mid tones. I know there is some Prisma Greyed Lavender in there too. Also there is a light wash of pale vermilion in the front bang area that brings back just a little warm reflected light to this area of his face and hair.

The closer I got to finishing the hair the sharper the pencils as I tried to model the hair with a little more detail. There were quick transitions from light to dark along the long sides of the clumps of hair, while the transition from dark to light on the tops or flatter planes of the clumps might be smoother and more gradual as they came to a highlight and then quickly darken depending on how abruptly the hair curled away from the light. Basically I was paying close attention to how the hair appeared in the reference photo, trying to follow the play of light and shadow without getting too mired in the detail.

A Supernatural colored pencil piece

Here is a piece that I started back in May. It's not quite done, but I realized it was pretty close to being finished and I had never mentioned it here. Better late than never!

It's drawn on a 7 x 9.5 sheet of Pastelmat paper. I bought this small pad of paper some time ago because I wanted to try out the Pastelmat, which I had heard so much about. It turned out to be a great paper for both colored pencil and pastels.

This project was sparked by this screen cap from the Supernatural TV series. These characters have inspired a lot fanart from me :-)



The animated gif shows my progress. The animation cycles through twice before stopping. If you want to see it again, just reload the screen as you hold down the shift key on your keyboard.

I started with the contour line drawing which I traced directly from my reference picture, making just a few adjustments to the composition. I moved Dean on the right closer to Sam so their figures are overlapping a bit. I changed the background to distant vegetation, though many colors in the original background inspired me. I also shifted the direction that Sam's eyes are looking. I have him looking directly out at the viewer.

Since Sam's figure is slightly out of focus, without much definition in his face, especially his eyes, I had to hunt around for other references for his face. I'll probably make other minor changes to his clothes before I'm done.

Since the paper size was small, I was able to print my outline directly to the paper and thus save myself the tedious job of transferring it via light table or tracing paper.




I started with Dean's face, going mostly with pink tones, some lights and reddish browns for the shadows. Since the paper is yellow toned it really cut down on the yellow colors I would normally use to build up skin tones.




I'm trying to remember the actual pencils I had used at this stage. I think is was mostly Coloursoft's Soft Pink and Luminance's Titanium Buff and probably some Primacolor White for the lightest colors.

If I had more than a stub of Prismacolor's Deco Pink, I would have used it to add the pinker tones. I used Coloursoft's Pink which is a pretty close match to the Deco Pink and probably more colorfast. I've heard that Prisma's Deco Pink was not colorfast and that is why it was phased out of Prisma's selection.

I know you can still get Deco Pink pencils from Ann Kullberg's online store and I considered doing this for a while. But then I decided that I might as well just wean myself away from any dependence on that color completely. At some point all the old stock is going to be depleted entirely and then we'll all be out of luck :-)

All the rest of the colors are probably Prisma's, in darkening values, Light Peach, Peach, Burnt Ochre and Tuscan Red.

Back to Good Day

I'm back to working on my Good Day drawing. I had slowly been filling in some of the tree trunk color now and then, but a few weeks ago I started back in more seriously. I'm now working the background shrubbery on the right. Most of the right side is filled with bushes so I expect it will be a somewhat tedious process, but I feel re-energized and ready to tackle it.



The next shot shows a little more progress.



I've been using an assortment of greens, Primacolor Dark Green and Prussian Green for the darks. For the middle values, Coloursoft Green, Prismacolor Kelly Green and Jade Green and for the lights, Primacolor Pale Sage and Grey Green Light. Also some yellow greens, Prismacolor Spring Green, Chartreuse and Cinnabar Yellow.

I'm using the whole array of Cool Greys for the tree trunk, plus some warm greys, here and there, and some purplish colors like Parma Violet and Blue Violet Lake.

As a first step, I've been using my reference image to draw in the shapes a little better. Then I started lightly blocking in the colors to distinguish shubbery from tree bark more easily. Once everything was more clearly defined I started layering the colors, building up shapes with mostly the middle tones, but being careful not to cover up my highlight areas.

Once I have enough color down on the paper I'll usually bring in my short stubby bristle brush to blend the colors together and spread them down into the paper. Then it's back to layering more color in, this time using more lights and darks to further define the shapes.

I might do a few cycles of this layering and brushing until I've gotten good coverage of the paper and the colors have intensified. The last step will always be penciling on more color, and highlighting and darkening as needed.



I've been trying to keep the shapes fuzzy to get the illusion of distance, but not are blurred as the background on the left side which is even farther back. I may have to come back later with a light color overall to add more blur. We'll see how that goes.