Tuesday 31 March 2015

31/03: DEJA VU

Well, I hope I learned a few lessons from my last drawing .... today I started again on the girl in the red hat but decided to use white pastelmat paper instead of Derwent watercolour paper.   

Pastelmat has a slightly 'fluffy' surface (cork I think)  which is wonderful for pastel work and I have done several coloured pencils works on this surface, particularly when I wanted to use a coloured support.

But ... instead of my usual Gung Ho style of diving straight into the drawing and flitting around doing bits here and there I decided to test some colours on the pastelmat and blend a few to check the results .... so many subtle layers involved in skin tones ...   I started on her face this time as that was the bit that went horribly wrong before (after I sprayed it with fixative and the colours ran) I must remember not to mix watercolour pencils with wax based pencils as the wc ones react to the moisture in the fixative!!

some of my 'research' page  



and progress today on the second version:

I'm happier that I've got a smoother finish to her skin and this won't look the same as the previous attempt as I'm changing the braids around and drawing different colour flowers on the fan etc .... I can't draw exactly the same image twice 



7 comments:

  1. I can already see that this is much better and definitely equal to your previous portraits! Can't wait to see it finished!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you Jan .... not a great photo as taken in artificial light which is casting shadows but so, so good (fingers firmly crossed). I can't wait to see it finished also LOL

    ReplyDelete
  3. Good on you for trying again Sue, I hate doing that and usually just ditch the whole thing.
    I know I shouldn't say this as it's my picture on the front....but I really don't get on with Derwent watercolour paper, I really struggle to get good colour strength and there seems to be a limit on how many layers are possible. I have gone back to my favourite Fabrianno Artistico for cp, which has a bit more tooth.

    Good luck I am sure you will crack this and you know what they say about practice.....?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Sue, you truly amaze me! Looking brilliant already!

    ReplyDelete
  5. I did love the red hat though. You have certainly made a good beginning. She looks great.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hi Bev. Its funny I did two cps portraits on Derwent and got on really well with the paper - but I do have two pads. I ordered one which arrived damaged with only half the sheets useable and a replacement was sent ... it could be a variance in the quality between the two pads I guess ... but I can see there is a difference between back and front of paper so it may be as simple as I've used the 'wrong side' ... but I've gone off of it for the moment!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Thank you Sherry and Jo. Jo - she will have a bright red hat but I wanted to tackle the skin first before getting to work on the hat/fan which took a lot of layers to get the rich colours. I need to get this worked out as I think the subject is perfect for the red frame I bought ..... and its a great opportunity to use some of the bright coloured pencils which I don't use when doing animal portraits

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for visiting my Blog. Let me know what you think :-)

I have disabled the Captcha requirement at the request of followers who find it irritating when posting comments. However to stop the subsequent flood of spam posts I can no longer accept comments from Anonymous sources.
Apologies if this is a problem
Thank you
Sue
x