Drawing with Watercolour Pencils

The above picture looks a lot better than the photograph I produced here, but it allows us to get an idea of how a finished drawing would look like. I admit that this is my first portrait in colour, but I intend to do more.

I love colour but I confess that with paint and a brush I lack the technique. At school I did not like art because we mostly did LETTERING which involves remembering angles; it was more like maths than art. We never used paint or very seldom, if I remember correctly. Besides, nowadays I do not seem to have enough patience with so many tubes of colour, mixing at least 3 tones of each colour, a container for turps, another for linseed oil, several brushes to apply the paint and to wipe and clean afterwards, rags, paint smears all over the place, large canvasses, the easel, etc. Painting enthusiasts will not look kindly on this statement, because it is their field and they like it, but for me I feel more at home with a coloured pencil or two in my hand and an A3 or A4 size paper attached to my drawing board. People may comment and perhaps rightly so that mine is a case of "the grapes are sour".

With a graphite pencil I can do a modest piece of work. I say this because I myself like the end result and it is accepted and liked by the subject himself/herself. With the pencil in my hand I find that I have ample patience, and this is a pre-requisite because as you might know through your own experience, to produce a likeness from a photograph requires hours of observation, trial and error, precise measurements and above all a sense of proportion. I mean one has to be almost exact to produce an identifyable face (see pencil drawing below), I like drawing and I like colour, so why not draw in colour and this is what I'm doing now.

I'm drawing the portrait of a girl from a photograph I took of her last summer, with her permission of course. She is a relation with large blue-grey eyes and long lashes, golden hair and perfect skin - an intriguing subject which a portrait artist can hardly resist. I decided to do the drawing on A4 paper and I started sketching her with 3 or 4 pencils in my hand - a pink and a yellow for the skin cross-hatched over each other, a brown and a purple for the shading used very lightly around the eyes and for the contours of the nose and especially around the base and nostrils. After 3 or 4 hours of measuring with a dividers and a calculator I had the basic shapes in, of the eyes, the nose and the right ear together with the contours of the face, chin, neck and the hair. I draw sitting down in a comfortable armchair and I find that drawing at arms length is the best postition for me because I can judge better what I'm doing. I draw the details 'close up' however, like the eyelashes, the pupils, the light spot in the iris, the shading in the lips and the teeth. Well after this hard 3 hour session, I find that the portrait does not look at all like my subject but rather like the actress (I forgot her name, at the moment) in Crocodile Dundee.

As a drawing of a girl's face it was Ok, but I have to bring out the likeness. I shorten the nose a wee bit and give her a narrower bridge. The good thing about watercolour pencils is that you can erase your mistakes, provided you did not push too hard on the pencils. So this is the number 1 rule. Hold the pencils as you should when drawing and build up your colour by repeated overlapping not by using 'force'. After more careful study of the face before me, I decide to make it more refined, leaner - less distance between nose and left cheekbone and I also needed a softer chin and less jaw-line. I also touched the left side of the lips to make the mouth smaller. As I filled in more blue over the grey already in the eyes and defined the black pupil and put it the coal-black eyelashes, the face of my niece finally began to look at me from the paper.

With a smile of satisfaction I filled in the space behind with blue to compliment the colour of her eyes. In the photograph that I was working from the background is white and the choice of the blue colour was a split-second decision. The second session of re-defining and correcting the drawing took me another 3 hours, I should think but all that now remained was to apply water to the colours. I like this method better, applying water when I'm done with the colorpencils while other artists may prefer diluting the colours as they progress.  I used a small brush and started with the hair, rinsing the brush as I alternated between the yellows and the browns. Then I did the irises and the blue-grey colour became more vivid as I gently applied the brush in circular strokes. Gradually I wetted the whole surface area of the face taking care not to spread the darks over the lighter shades.

I uploaded the finished portrait as well as another of the work in progress.