After yesterday's late night fun, I kicked off today with three more experiments with coloured…
JenH In Coloured Pencil
It was still raining today, so no watercolours. Instead, I went for the experiment at the top of my list. I know that angular figure drawing of people from behind in coloured pencil feels natural, suggesting that might become my coloured pencil style. But I also know that this doesn’t feel as natural when drawing portraits with coloured pencil. Which begs the question how does it feel drawing people from in front using coloured pencil. So I thought I’d give it a go. Today’s model is JenH, someone who worked out well from behind in an angular painting.
So I did all the usual things. Put a drawing down first, cheating by using a grid. Got some colour down quickly to mark out the shapes. Then put on whatever colours I liked the look of and/or could detect in the source photo with my artistic eyes. Then, when I thought I couldn’t add any more colour, I burnished it over using cream, ivory, beige red and cinnamon, depending on how light or dark I wanted different parts of the body to be. This is where things started going wrong.
The cream was too yellow. I started with Jen’s right arm and hated the way it came out, so used ivory instead of cream in all the lightest bits in the rest of the painting. And the cinnamon felt a bit too dark today, masking out a lot of colour. So for future paintings like this, my burnishing colours for flesh areas will be restricted to white, ivory and maybe beige red. These will all be kind to my underlying impressionistic colours.
As for the experiment, angular figure drawing from the front doesn’t feel unnatural but also not any more natural than drawing with curves. I think angular front views in coloured pencil will only appear very occasionally on this blog. Coloured pencil figure drawing will tend to be angular paintings from behind.
And finally, was the painting a success? Well, the cream burnishing in the arm wasn’t great but isn’t bad enough on its own to constitute a disaster. That left hand, though, is a monstrosity, and the painting doesn’t look right with the bottom cropped off. It’s a no from me.
<Jen was later used as a guinea pig for testing coloured pencil solvents>
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