Sometimes it feels...

...like I'm coloring my life away, in red,...well, Raspberry and Crimson Red to be exact. It took a few days of dragging myself back to my drawing board at odd moments to finish the unexciting job of filling in the base color for the shirt. After much sharpening of pencils, careful layering and wearing three brushes down to stubs, I have the shirt area covered.

Here is a shot with one half unbrushed.



A closer look.




And finally full coverage! Now the more interesting shading and modeling can begin.



I also took the opportunity at this point to redraw some of my guidelines since some of them had all but disappeared. I did the original tracing of my drawing onto the Uart 800 paper using a number of different pencils. I started with a very sharp light brown Prismacolor but somewhere along the way I decided to use some of my new Eno mechanical colored pencils.




I had ordered these not too long ago because I have a fascination for pens, pencils, and paper in general. I had no particular use in mind, I just thought the Eno pencils looked pretty in eight colors with nice thin leads. When I was transferring my drawing it occurred to me that maybe using them to draw the lines was the perfect application. I had different colors to choose for different parts of my drawing and the .5 lead was fine enough for the smallest detail without constant sharpening needed. Yay!!!

Well,no,...unfortunately they fade badly. The blue especially could be used like disappearing ink. Need to write a secret message, use the blue, in a few months not a trace will remain. Of course I did most of the lower half of my outline using the blue, so I had a very stimulating time reconstructing those lines.

Still like my Eno pencils, they're cute, but from now on I will only use them to write letters to annoying friends. ;-)

Continuing with the Shirt

I've finally started working on the shirt. At first I was laying a few strips of color at a time and working them to a more finished look, as can be seen as the area on his shoulder. But then I decided it would probably be better to lay a base color on all the shirt and then start to detail it. I wouldn't want to have the problem of the different sections looking slightly different because I couldn't remember exactly what colors I used and how I layered them.

I'm using Prismacolor Raspberry and Crimson Red as the base colors. I layered a couple of light coats of both colors and then used a bristle brush to spread the color into the paper. It blends quite nicely into a fair representation of my reference color.



In the close up you can see how the newly laid color differs from the shoulder area. There are a couple more colors on the shoulder, Tuscan Red for the shadows and I think it was CS Soft Pink for the lighter shades (Yikes, I'm glad I'm trying to remember this now!)

On the right side of the collar rib you can see some strokes of color that have not been blended yet with the brush. Without the brushing, it would be much more work to get the coverage I'm getting with only a few layers of color. And I'm sure it just wouldn't look the same either. I think even tons of layers applied with the sharpest of pencils would not give you the same look. The colors acquire a softness when the brush is applied, that I like very much.

I'm probably not applying enough layers to get a really saturated look with the brushing alone. I'm really not sure how far to take it, but I probably will know by the time I finish this.