Stages of the latest portrait

The days of the week have all run together lately. I had a rush job portrait commission so this piece has been my only focus for the last week. It's now done and in the mail to the client. YES- made the deadline! While I was working I took quick shots with my phone so I could share the progress online. Here are the steps as it went.

 I used a blue Canson Mi-Teintes paper. I know some of the photos look more grey than blue but I did shoot with the natural light from the window in front of my drawing board.

 First layers on skin and shirts.

 I used a variety of browns and golden yellows on his shirt. Building up the skin tones was trickier- using a lot of deco orange, pumpkin and mineral orange and burnt ochre.

 To get the blond hair to be blond and not turn green on this blue paper I had to layer white pencil first to keep the yellow and blue from mixing.

 It took a little while to figure out the reds for the other shirt. What finally worked was using peach and vermillion in the light areas and permanent red for the overall color, tuscan red for the shadows.

Calling it done!

The stages of Pouty Face

Many times when working on a portrait I post pictures of the piece in progress on my Facebook page. I've found that people really love to see the progression and the layers build up. I've noticed that artists and non-artists alike enjoy seeing how it works so here is the progression of colored pencil layers as I was working on the Pouty Face portrait I shared in the last blog post.

Here I've just got the basic outline in and I'm working out my palette while starting to get some darks blocked in.

You can see that little strip of paper on the side- that's where I test my colors. For this portrait I'm working on a dark blue Canson pastel paper. It's actually darker than it looks in the photos. When I took these pics I was just using my phone at the drawing board. The board is right in front of 2 windows so sometimes the colors shift depending on the time of day I took the picture.

So here I'm beginning to build up skin tones. Any time I'm working on colored paper I cut an extra strip of the same color paper to test the pencils on- especially for skin. On this paper I couldn't use any of my usual portrait colors that have yellow in them. You know what happens when you mix yellow and blue..... he didn't need to have green skin.

I used lots of peachy and orangey tones to work the skin. Surprisingly deco orange got used a lot. I hadn't considered it right away but it really worked.

In this pic the lips look a lot more orange than they really were. They were a bit of a challenge though to get them pink enough without them turning purple on the paper.

He's almost done here- just building up the background colors and the red of his shirt. I went back into the eyes to push the values a little more and then back into the hair to fill it out with more strands.

Pouty Face is done and Pouty Face happens to be my youngest grandson. He is quite the character so I'm sure I'll be doing more portraits with his very expressive self.