Sunday, May 15, 2011

Color Pencil Sketch of a Young Woman


This is a picture I sketched in color pencils using Prismacolor Pencils in a Strathmore 400 series sketchbook.  This drawing took about 6 hours.  I found a photo of a young woman in a catalogue that came in the mail. She had a nice pose. But what I liked was the warm colors in the photo and I wanted to do something with warm colors since I have been doing a lot of charcoal sketches lately. The nice thing about the Prismacolor pencils is their rich color and the smooth way they blend together. I used a blending stub to blend but find you have to use a lot of pressure. If you blend you find reapplying another layer of color more brilliant and follow up blending is even more brilliant. I try to avoid the use of black and prefer to blend colors together to get a richer dark but in this portrait I did use a little black on the eyelashes. I am very happy with the Strathmore paper it is very forgiving of mistakes and even with colored pencil I can erase with both a kneaded erasure and a latex erasure. I think it turned out very well.  

Please see the tab for pricing options to commission your own portrait in charcoal.