Back on the coloured pencils and I thought I'd try doing a portrait of David…
David Bowie
In the mood for a coloured pencil drawing today, so looked at the CD collection and decided to go for Bowie. The CD collection is pretty good inspiration for this sort of thing. With sportspeople it’s a case of seeing someone on the telly and thinking they might make a good subject. I can’t ever sit down and think of a sportsperson to paint. With music, though, everyone’s a potential subject and my CD collection is a huge vault of ideas.
Four bits to the methodology worth mentioning today:
– while I always find myself putting down the initial drawing for coloured pencils in straight lines, I decided today to not emphasise the angularity and to just keep the rest of the painting round and curvy
– I tried especially hard to get the gaze in the eyes right and to make the eyeballs look spherical rather than just 2D shapes on the paper. I think I caught something but messed up by making the iris of his blue eye too big
– for the burnishing, I went back to three tone flesh burnishing: cinnamon in the darkest places, white in the lightest and beige red in between. I wanted to keep the sharp pointed shadows on his cheeks
– for the hair, rather than putting down a big shape, I painted hairs. For the first few goes, I used the side of the pencil lead to get down lots of colour but later on I drew in big long sweeping hairs with the points of the pencils. Once the forehead was looking good, I put in lots of hairs coming down over it towards the eye. And on most of the hair body I added more dark coloured hair marks close to the scalp and at the ends to leave a lighter m shiner colour in between
The end result isn’t too bad. While I can’t claim this is a perfect likeness, I’ve definitely caught something. Cover up the mouth and green eye and you’ll see the blue eye and hair are looking pretty good, even if that blue iris is a bit too big. I’m going to put this one up for sale. To see the price, click here.
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