Gregg Allman In Coloured Pencil

For subject matter I went for Gregg Allman.  I’ve had a go at Gregg before, both on his own with the markers and with the rest of the band in inktense pencils but felt that he deserved a better, more serious portrait.

This one took me three days.  I guess I could have finished it in two but coloured pencils are hard work and I didn’t want to pick up a repetitive strain injury.  To help me through this, I had lots of Grateful Dead playing in the background.  Sometimes with coloured pencils you’re filling out large areas with one pencil and minimal pressure.  You need to be able to get in the zone and let the mind drift.  This might not be a Grateful Dead portrait but it needed some Dead to help its creation.

For the black areas I used my usual combination of Delft blue, dark red, dark pthalo green and helio blue reddish but added in a bit of black towards the end.

For the hair I marked in some grooves with a pointy stick before starting.  And then coloured it in with lots of different colours in individual strokes following the hairs.  A few times I also tried negative painting where the hairs joined the skull, putting dark colours in the shadows between them.

For the skin tones, I used lots of layers with different ideas.  Some layers were all about darkening shadows.  Some were about brightening the highlights.  Some were all about warming up or cooling down different bits of the face.  Some were about adding colours that looked good.  And some were about adding a plain layer of a single flesh tone just to keep dragging things back to normal.

And after all the pencil marks were down I took a deep breath and went over them all with the blender pen.  Here’s what the painting looked like before and after the blending:

Before considering the merits of the final painting, I need to evaluate the impact of the hot pressed paper and of the blender pens.

First up, the paper.  Yes, I like the results.  I still have the slightly out of focus look that I get with cold pressed paper.  The main difference I noticed was that the paper seemed to have more capacity for colour than the cold pressed, which I wasn’t expecting.  And it’s slightly less tiring using the pencils on smoother paper.  I may well switch to hot pressed paper at some point.  But I need to buy that paper in a pad rather than using a block.  Blocks cost more because they’re glued down on all four sides to prevent the paper buckling when wet, so don’t make sense with coloured pencils.

And then therefore the blender pens.  I can see that they blend the colours while also making them darker and looking more like paint than pencils.  And they seem to work better on the smoother paper.  But I bought three pens for £15 and two of them are almost completely trashed after this painting, so they’re an expensive way to blend.  Maybe bottled solvents make more sense, with the pens only being used for fine detail.  I’ll try this out in the summer when I can go outside with the solvent.  But using only blender pens, while interesting, won’t become a regular thing.

And as a painting I think this one works.  It’s definitely Gregg and I’ve managed to catch a weariness in the eyes.  This colours in the hair are bring things to life and the black, red and yellow shapes in the background are interesting.  Gregg’s up for sale.