Another Project - Colored Pencil - Follow Me

I started this other project some weeks ago and have made some progress which I will now log here. I also used the Fisher 400 paper on this one but I chose to use colored pencil instead of pastel as the medium. I wanted to test the paper with both the pastel and colored pencil mediums.

I ordered two 20 x 28 and two 14x 20 sheets of the Fisher400 paper about a month and a half ago. I was eager to try it out, having heard some pretty good things about it. Having now dabbled a bit on this paper I have to agree that so far it seems quite wonderful.

The Fisher 400 paper looks just like a fine gauge sandpaper, though it is manufactured solely as art paper. I had to order it from England, since the artist who created it does not have any US distributors yet. I sure hope that it becomes available more locally soon.

I made a collage from reference photos in Photoshop and traced out this sketch.



It's a composition of my favorite subjects Sam and Dean from the TV show Supernatural. I'm calling this piece Follow Me.

I was able to use my lightbox to transfer my sketch to the paper. Fortunately I discovered that this paper is translucent enough to use with the lightbox. This is good news because I had the dubious pleasure of copying the sketch for the pastel piece using transfer paper and it was a pain. Here I am working away at it.



It took me a few hours to finish transferring all the little lines, but I've learned patience. The more details you capture the easier it is to draw later.

Here is a bad picture of the transferred drawing. I have to get a better set up next time. My daylight source was off to one side and when I tried to add light with my fluorescent drawing table lamp, it just added another color cast, which I was unable to remove.




Still it gives a good idea of how it looked. I used a couple of different colored pencil to transfer the lines, blue ones for the clouds, some grey for part of Deans shirt, white for the circle around the figures and a brownish ochre for all the rest. Mostly it was just experimenting. I also varied the pressure. I think the right side is probably a little too faint, though I finished off at a pretty good line thickness on the left.

I almost forgot to take a picture at this stage.That is why Dean's face actually shows some shadowing which I had started to block in. Fortunately I still captured the mostly un-worked line drawing.

All the brainstorming for the composition, drawing the sketch and getting it transferred took most of a weekend. I finally got it to the point of starting to draw and was able to get this far.




I got a better picture this time, though it is still shadowed on the right.

I think this paper is going to hook me completely. It takes color incredibly well. I have barely gotten started but I can tell I will be able to layer lots and lots of color on it.

I'm also going to get hooked on working at this large size paper. The 20x28 inch size gives me such control over the drawing of details on the face. One thing though, this paper is going to eat my pencils by the bushel.

Here is a close up of my start.



The layering has just begun, but I couldn't resist working his eye more, to catch a glimpse of what this paper might yield.