12/19/2023 0 Comments Colored pencil portraitsIt’s funny, I was just looking at this one in person earlier today and my pencil strokes throughout the entire piece are rushed. The hair really should take longer than the face itself if you want it to look realistic. ![]() I see a pattern forming! And not a good one! Luckily this was the last time I rushed through hair on a colored pencil portrait. Problem #2 I rushed through the hair…again It creates much more realistic skin than I got here, making it look more like an oil painting. Next with just a tiny amount of paint thinner I blend that out. I then take a white wax based pencil, either Luminance white or Derwent Drawing Chinese white and go over the skin. Now I block everything in FAR darker than it should be and blend it out with odorless mineral spirits. After this portrait I adjusted how I create pale skin tones. I don’t want plastic, but I also don’t want a crayon look and I feel that this one is too close to the crayon side. Whether or not you feel this is a problem depends on your personal taste. I spent far longer on the detail work of this piece than my previous with Scarlet Johansson, so there was improvement there. For this one, I worked in polychromos with a white prismacolor. This was my second attempt at a portrait in colored pencil. A lot of my problems with this one came down to rushing. I would likely end up spending at least twice the amount of time that I did on the original. Of course, I would have spent more time on her hair as well. ![]() That might mean finding a second reference photo so that I could see where shadows should go. Her skin is too smooth and plastic looking. If I were to use this same reference photo again, I would have hyped up the shadows on her face a LOT! It wouldn’t even look like the same reference photo. You need super sharp pencils for those final layers and details to clean things up and avoid having fuzzy looking hair. Turns out it doesn’t really work that way. I let them stay fairly dull thinking I would smooth everything out with my odorless mineral spirits when I blended. Besides rushing, my pencils were NOT sharp enough for creating the finer details. Her hair doesn’t look natural at all! Never mind that she’s actually wearing a wig, the wig wasn’t this bad. Part because I didn’t love the reference photo (see problem #1). I KNOW that you need to slow down and take your time on the hair. I’ve been drawing portraits in graphite for years. The funny thing about this problem…I knew better. ![]() Her skin was completely washed out in the reference so I couldn’t see the dimensions I needed to to make her look…uh…not like a flat cartoon character. Getting used to the medium for creating skin is enough trouble without adding the problem of not having a decent photo to work from. You can’t just take any photo and make it look amazing, especially when you’re getting started with something new…like drawing people in colored pencil. This is one of those pieces that is a bit embarrassing for me mostly because I know I rushed it and didn’t complete my best work.Ĭhoosing a good reference photo is HUGE. I was fine with fur and feathers but people in this medium were new to me. This was my first attempt at a human portrait in colored pencils. After completing my recent fan art of Jon Snow from Game of Thrones, I started looking back at some of the things I’ve learned since creating my first couple of colored pencil portraits.
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