Mika M, Watching Ross Kemp’s Bridge Of Lies

I started by using a grid to put down my initial outline.  This might be my last figure drawing grid for a while given how I have a book on gestural figure drawing waiting to be read and reviewed but we’ll see.  Anyway, the drawing came out really well today.  I’m not sure why but it may be that all this work I’ve been doing on portraits is starting to affect my figure drawings.

For the colours, I went for indigo and bright blue with poppy red to give me a neutral dark and a decent purple to use in the darkest and next darkest areas.  And maybe it’s these triple glazed portraits making me think more of the mixtures I can get from these pencils than about the individual colours.  I wasn’t averse to using the red and blue on their own either.  I could see some oranges in my source photo, so picked out sun yellow to work with my poppy red (when previously I might have gone straight for the tangerine?).  And after putting down the pencil parks I wondered whether my shin was looking too saturated in places with red, yellow and blue, so I toned it down in those places with leaf green.  Using a brown would have been far too sensible.  And to finish off I added some very light pencil marks to the foreground using all the colours in the rest of the painting.

Once the colours were down, I wetted them starting with little details before going on to big shapes.  I tried to follow bodily contours and was careful to leave highlights in the hair.  And that was me done.

I think this is pretty good and worth putting in the shop window.  If anything, maybe some of my edges are too hard because of lack of practice.  What’s interesting, though, is how my approach has changes during eleven weeks of inactivity.  My drawing skills have improved and I seem to be more interested in mixing colours than I was before.  Anyway, time to stop the and put my feet up for the rest of the day.