CharlieK’s Back

As I was putting down a pencil outline, I noticed everything was quite angular, so decided to only use straight lines for the outline, albeit quite short straight lines in places like the toes.

For a long time, the only colours I put down were with the edge of the pencils rather than the point and going for the dark and earthy colours first, so today that was raw sienna, walnut brown and black.  This is how the filling out stage is going to work for me. To distinguish the left arm from the torso, I put some red in the arm and blue in the torso, and that naturally led me to putting some reds, blues and greens wherever I felt like it all over the body.

Next I moved on to the pointy bit of the pencil, going over the hair and all the dark shadowy areas.  For the hair, I was especially careful about the direction of the scribbles, trying to always go in the direction of the hair no add some texture.  Then a few more reds, blues and greens with the edges of the pencils to catch up a bit on all those dark areas.  Then I burnished over everything in white.

Finally I did a little bit of tinkering.  I added a little bit more red, green and blue.  I went over the edges of the hair shape with black pencil, making sure all the edges were straight lines.  And I added some faintish straight black outlines around body shapes.  And then I was done.

And I’m pleased with the outcome.  The straight edges work really well.  So does the directional scribbling in the hair.  Maybe some of the shadowy shapes on the body are a bit straight/hard edged but I’m not sure whether that’s a good or a bad thing.  And I think next time I’ll hold off on the pencil points for longer, maybe doing everything with the sides of the leads and only using the points for burnishing at the end.  Anyway, this one’s up for sale.