Today I tried to make a portrait of my husband, David. I received the extra skin tone pencils which I ordered recently, and had some more colours to choose from, which was quite convenient. I am still lacking in the brown and green area, though… I drew the portrait with pastel pencils (CretaColor) and didn’t make a preliminary sketch with charcoal. Which I should have done…
You can really recognize David from this drawing, but it still isn’t quite right. The area around the nose/cheeks is too flat, which makes his head less tall than it is (and makes the portrait seem to be drawn from a different angle – almost like a caricatura). I played a bit in Lightroom and tilted the picture a bit backward. That’s better already!
Now the proportions are about right. Next time I will take a bit more time to make a sketch before I start colouring. I can’t really erase the important lines after I start because I use colour pencils, so it has to be spot-on from the beginning.
By the way, this afternoon I visited the two main art stores in Den Haag (Artifac and Goedman) and though they are nice, they are not even close to De Kwast in Den Bosch. Artifac has nice things, I was soooo tempted by the Caran d’Ache pastel pencils they have… there were some papers lying around on which you could try the pencils out, and those were so nice. They blended easily, the colours were good and the hardness was just what I liked. The ColorCreta ones I have are nice too, just not as nice. Also not as expensive: the Caran d’Ache pencils are about one and a half times more expensive. Perhaps if this hobby sticks, I will come around and buy me a set of those Caran d’Ache pencils. I actually already made a selection of the numbers I’d like, just in case…
Oh, and I bought a nice bag for the pastel pencils, so I can have them all together instead of having some in the paper bag they came in:
