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.