Big Sam In Coloured Pencil

I still have loads of new art gear to try out, so no dash and splash for me today.  It’s time to give the coloured pencils a first outing.  For subject matter, I thought it best to start something easy as a confidence booster.  I could either have done some naked figure drawing of a portrait of Sam Allardyce, someone whose likeness I never seem to have any problem with.  In the end I decided to go with Big Sam because I suspect I may be doing a few portraits with the pencils.

Paper-wise, this is on 150gsm smooth cartridge paper.  I got two cartridge pads for my birthday: this and 96gsm medium.  While these will be OK to get me started, I’m already wondering whether I’ll be wanting to move on to watercolour paper at some point.

I started with a tough pencil drawing.  It was a freehand contour drawing rather than something drawn using a grid: I find this works better for portraits, especially Big Sam portraits.  I then went about shading everything in using the side of the lead trainer than the point.  It was like walking around the mountain before climbing it but also allowed me to put down lots of overlapping colours.  I used all sorts of impressionistic colours that I could see in my source photo.  Once I was happy with this underpainting, I set about doing the painting properly.

For the proper painting, I used the points of the pencils and pushed down hard for any detailed bits.  I worked through the face section by section: eyes, then ear, forehead, nose, left cheek, right cheek, mouth, chin, ‘tache space, neck.  After filling out each space, I would burnish it by putting a layer of white over it and pushing down hard: the idea is to flatten any texture in the paper and to make the pencil work look a bit more shiny.  I don’t know whether I’ve done this properly: I may have to wait until I use rougher paper to really know.

Then it was the jacket.  The sort of shape that was begging to be coloured in monotone black and to wipe out half my black pencil in one go.  But while I made the collar quite solid, I was a bit looser on the rest of the jacket, just applying various sideways fillings of black and grey with the side of the lead in different directions.  I also threw in some blue and magenta to fit with the rest of the painting and keep things interesting.  All burnished again with the white, of course.

And finally it was the hair.  I was expecting this to all go wrong but it didn’t come out too bad.  I just imagined I was combing it in and then blackened in some areas at the end.  The hair has a greasy look to it, which I quite like.

Paper-wise, I found this smooth cartridge paper a bit frustrating.  When I was putting down colour by pushing down hard, the paper didn’t really let me put one colour down on top of another.   I’m hoping that tougher paper has the capacity for more colours.  If it doesn’t then it’s the way I use the pencils that’s the problem.  I’ll find out another day.

Anyway, what’s the final result like?  And, more importantly, what’s my style like with the pencils (because this is the first I’ve seen of it)?  Perhaps unsurprisingly it looks like I’m going to be wild and impressionistic with the colours, much as I am with the inktense pencils. In fact, this felt like one of those days with the inktense pencils when I put down too much colour and don’t leave enough white.  So it’s a bit like using inktense pencils but with the shackles removed (and without all the fun of wetting the marks afterwards).  And the picture’s decent enough to go up for sale.  Coloured pencils are looking like a great medium to use when I don’t want to go outside.

<Edit: Sam was later used as a guinea pig for coloured pencil solvent testing but is still up for sale. To see the price, click here.  Here’s the new version:

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