My oh my, March has been busy. Mostly filled up with work-to-pay-the-bills and volunteer work for a new community nonprofit organization. But I thought I’d share with you my one and only art-related project for this busy month. I’ve been asked to do a pet portrait for a neighbor and so I’m making a return to colored pencil for this project.
I’m learning just how different colored pencil is from oil painting. While oil painting can either be loose and spontaneous or careful and detailed, with colored pencil, there is only one way to go. A roadmap is clearly needed. Some artists can freehand draw the detailed line drawing required. It is possible to do a fairly detailed graphite drawing and then adapt it to colored pencil by tracing and transferring the line drawing. Some artists will draw from life but most draw from photographs. Some create their line drawings using a grid drawing technique. Many colored pencil artists do a trace and transfer directly from a photo reference in the interest of accuracy as I did with this portrait of Little John.
One bit of wisdom for any aspiring colored pencil artists out there: It is all about the pencil and the paper. Maybe that sounds obvious, but it is the interaction of the two that makes or breaks the final piece. While graphite works well with a smooth-surfaced paper, colored pencil must have paper with just the right amount of “tooth”. That slightly rough surface is essential. It is the tiny hills and valleys on the paper surface that collect the bits of pigment. Different papers create different effects. Likewise, pencils can be soft, hard, oil-based or wax-based and the result is greatly affected by these factors. Volumes could be written on this subject and have been. One particular effect I really like is to create a soft oil-based underpainting with a pastel-like quality created using a powder blender on a rough paper, then apply a fixative and then come back on top with harder pencils to create finer details. These are techniques used in the Brush and Pencil technique developed by Alyona Nickelsen.
For the sharper details, I used Prismacolor wax-based pencils and some in the Verithin harder versions. While I feel it helped to create that balance of soft edges and sharper details in the face, I feel I was not able to get the degree of blending that I hoped for. The paper, Mi Teintes My Touch, was just a little too rough to fully hide the grain.
Hers is the finished portrait of Little John. As is often the case, this beloved companion is no longer around and this will serve as a memory of a special relationship with a special dog.
Leave a Reply