Lemons and Chrome

I think I must REALLY enjoy doing portraits, because now I am portrait thirsty. pant, pant....

Oh well! I've got a more figurative "portrait" up my sleeve that I'll start as soon as I get my larger sheets of Fisher 400 paper.

I started this little one today. Its 8" x 10" on pastelbord. So far I've used Coloursofts and Luminance - my favorite pencils for Pastelbord. I also used my black Supracolor and Neocolor watersoluable pencils from Caran D'Ache in the background.

More to come tomorrow.

Brown Eyed Girl 2

OK here we go. I've been working on this feverishly all day and can confirm that there is black polychromo pencil smeared on my face. It is not the best look.

I hope it looks something like the original in these jpgs. Its an overcast day and my camera is overcompensating, distorting the saturation. Plus I have an old monitor and its hard to know what it will look like for you. It is colorful in person, but I am guessing maybe not as much as in the jpg.

I work in a vertical stroke, meaning I lay down the pencil in vertical lines side by side. I didn't always use this method, but on Fisher paper I find it is the best way to put pencil on the paper. What I have been playing with, concerning that linear technique, is leaving the stroke visible. I can very easily blend the whole entire thing (with my trusty index finger) and obscure the lines, but I have kept them. I think if it were perfectly smooth, then when you look at it up close, it would lose that feeling of the human hand. In the age of amazing color printers, who wants perfectly blended art, right?

click to enlarge the image to better see the stroke.

& for a jpg that should scare everyone just a bit. EEEK. I don't like erasing, but when the top of her head didn't fade into the darkness enough, I took my blue painting tape and my fingernail and removed pencil so I could get it blacker. Maybe I'll take this picture out on Halloween for a fright.

Have a good weekend everyone!

Brown Eyed Girl

Portrait time! Yay!

Work in Progress, of course! It will be 14" x 20" when I am finished, so larger than life. I just love her olive skin tones and large eyes. Her eyes remind me of that famous fresco in Pompeii.

For those new readers, I do most of my portraits using Polychromos pencils on Fisher 400 paper. I use a linear stroke and interweave the colors which creates kind of an impressionistic feel, and then sometimes I blend out that stroke, and sometimes I don't. I haven't decided yet if I will on this one or not. I'm using a lot of green in the skin tones: grren gold, chromium green opaque, and chrome oxide green. The green really helps tone down the pinky colors of the flesh toned pencils.

5 Lemons in a Row

5 Lemons

6" x 18"

$650

Continuing my granite series! I really like how the black and white top with the black background allows the subject to pop. I've gotten some interest in how I do the granite in these, so I stopped and photographed between steps. I think they are self explanatory, but if you have any questions, let me know. You can click the images to enlarge them.

the name of the pencil didn't get in this photo. Its Persian Grey.

5 Red Apples in Row

5 Red Apples in a Row

6" x 18"

$650