Soft pastels

I had thought that I had no interest in trying to deal with color in my drawings, but then I started feeling drawn to pastels. Now, oil pastels were always my favorite artistic medium when I was little, so I researched them first. In doing that research, I first learned what a pastel is (mostly pigment, with as little as possible of something to bind the pigment into a usable stick—of course, in the cheap ones I'm using there's probably a good deal more binder). I also learned of the existence of regular non-oil pastels. These can be either hard and soft, but if someone just says "pastels", they're probably talking about soft non-oil pastels.

I would say that oil pastels are like crayons but ten times awesomer...and soft pastels are like chalk but ten times awesomer.

When Michael's had all the pastels 40% off, I bought a small set of the store brand soft pastels, and proceeded to play around with them a bit. This is Artist's Loft Level 1: Academic Soft Pastels (I wish I could have afforded either nicer pastels or a bigger box, but this was good for a first experience) on Strathmore 300 series charcoal paper.

Of course, the first thing I did had to be Scarlet Pimpernel-y...I can just imagine Percy chalking this up on some prison after they've rescued a bunch of aristos or something. :-) I love the bright colors and the way they slide onto the paper, encouraging broader, bolder strokes than I'm usually comfortable with. These are my two favorite colors in the set, too: I like how vivid they are.

I was still just enjoying the pretty colors here. As you can probably guess from the previous two pictures, flowers are my go-to "hey, I can kind of draw this" object.

And here are all 12 colors in the set (yes, there is a white hiding down in that corner). It's very basic, but it's enough for me to figure out that I like pastels. Now I just have to decide whether I should get the 48-piece set with a 40% off coupon sometime, or whether I should save up for a different brand. It sounds like pastels are definitely something where you get what you pay for, but these certainly didn't make me unhappy.

6. My sister, M.

This is the first drawing that I haven't done in one (usually semi-interrupted) sitting. I did it half on the evening of the 6th and half on the evening of the 8th (okay, so technically I finished it at 1am, but we'll call that the 8th too just for simplicity's sake). I wanted to finish it on the 7th, but my blood pressure was acting up again, and it's a bit hard to draw when you're lying flat on your back. :-(

This is the first picture that I have touched up very slightly in GIMP besides just hiding the person's name. I had had to redraw her glasses several times to get it right, and since this paper doesn't always erase very well,  there was one annoying ghost line that I just couldn't get rid of. So I edited it out. I don't know why the paper has issues; most of the time it's fine, but once it smears or otherwise decides it doesn't feel like erasing, you're not going to be able to get rid of it with anything short of scraping the surface completely off the paper.

Her hair was definitely the part I was looking forward to most. I think I did a good job on the braid. I had difficulty with some of the rest; I need to try to make each of my pencil strokes longer, so each strand of hair isn't made up of three or four strokes. Also, I realized after the fact that instead of shading the highlight with separate strokes than the surrounding hair, I should have just drawn it all normally and run over it with the kneaded eraser afterwards. I'll try that next time, I guess.

I'm still making a conscious choice to minimize the amount of shading. I'm going to start working on shading pretty soon, but I want to do some more research first. I'm going to get some books about drawing from the library, hopefully.

5. Barbara Hale as Della Street

So this definitely isn't quite recognizable as Della. I made her mouth too small, and I really struggled with making her face appear round instead of angular. Oh, and I had to erase the right eye, and it smudged and wouldn't erase completely. :-(

Other than that, I'm actually pretty happy with this. I mean, she definitely looks like somebody from the '50s, and I managed to use a bit more shading than I have recently. So far, when I'm drawing from something in black and white, it's definitely been easier to do shading than when drawing from something in color.

I also switched from using a 4-by-4 grid to a 3-by-3 (4.5" square instead of 5" square, since the math works out better). It was a step I'd been looking forward to, and although I think the larger squares contributed to my problems on Della's mouth, it was otherwise a pretty smooth transition.

4. M. R.

I was all excited to keep drawing after I started this blog, but was delayed first by a crazy knitting project and then by a bad cold that left me on the couch for more of last week than any cold should be allowed to do. But the project has been finished and the cold is almost gone, so hopefully I'll be able to get back on a roll.

This is from a Facebook photo of a little girl at our church. She's a little over a year old now, but this photo is from a few months ago when she was 9 or 10 months old. (I'm not sure exactly when the photo was taken.) She's got such an awesome grin in the photo: I had brought it up to draw from shortly before I got sick and ended up leaving it open in my browser all week, and every time I switched to that tab it made me smile all over again.

There were two things I really wanted to get right in this drawing, because they were the bits that looked the cutest in the original photo. The first was her turned-up nose, which has always reminded me of Sister Bear from the Berenstain Bears for some reason. (I haven't even read those books in a decade and a half!) The second was her mouth. Although it was open wide (due to the aforementioned huge grin), no teeth were visible, just her tongue; I wasn't sure how best to convey this with black-and-white pencil. Now that I've finished, I'd give myself a B- on the nose and a D on the mouth. I think the fact that everyone would expect teeth but they're not there makes it hard; I drew what the tongue looked like to me, but it isn't at all obvious that it's a tongue.

I'm really happy with how the eyes, eyebrows, and hair turned out, so that's good. I stuck with the harder pencil for the hair since it was so wispy instead of switching to the 2B like I had on the last one. Maybe next time I'll even try a 2H.

This is the first time that I don't think the scan has accurately represented my drawing. I put a bit more shading on the right side of her face along the jawline, but the scanner didn't pick up very much of it for some reason.

3. My brother, T.

I was browsing through old photos, and I found a nice family photo from several years ago that everybody looked really good in. My brother looked especially cute. (He doesn't appreciate being called cute anymore now that he's 13 and has a low voice and everything, but I can call him cute here since he was only 9.)

He was tipping his head to the side in the photo. I'm not sure if I quite got that across in the drawing, or if it just looks a little odd. Also, this is the first time I had ever drawn an ear, and I think it shows.

Again, I got most of the way through the drawing and realized I had no idea where I should put shading, so I decided to err on the side of not very much shading. It's probably pretty obvious that I'm drawing what I see, and what I see is eyes, mouth, hair, and other facial features to an extent, but not shadows. But for now, I'll concentrate on the fact that I'm pretty happy with the eyes, mouth, and hair, and the shadows can come later.

I used an HB pencil instead of a 2B pencil for the first time in this drawing. I like them both, and believe I will use both in the future.

2. Paulette Goddard as Lady Beryl

Once I drew my first picture, I knew my desire to draw wasn't a fluke and that I was going to continue drawing, so I decided to buy some pencils so I wouldn't be using up my sister's. I went to Michael's, where they had all kinds of fun things to choose from. I might get one of the bigger sets later, but for now I settled on a Prismacolor Scholar pack of 4 pencils (2B, HB, 2H, and Prismacolor Ebony). It was only $2.40, since I had a 40% off coupon! I particularly love the Ebony pencil; it made drawing Lady Beryl's hair a lot of fun.

This character was a murder suspect in one of the first episodes of the 1954 TV series Sherlock Holmes, with Leslie Howard's son Ronald Howard playing Sherlock Holmes. I strongly recommend the show; it is one of my favorite Sherlock Holmes adaptations. This picture comes from when she first appears. (Don't worry, I'm not giving away any spoilers of importance.) Lestrade informs Lord Beryl that his wife has confessed to the murder and that he can go see her now. Lord Beryl opens the door to the drawing room, where Lady Beryl is sitting all dramatically lit, and the camera zooms in on her slowly. When I watched this scene, all I could think was that I wanted to draw her face.

Since this is a black and white show, it was a lot easier to figure out the dark and light areas. The fact that she is wearing dark makeup also made things easier. I probably could have made the shading even darker, but it seemed scarily dark when I was doing it. It's like in my piano lessons where my teacher would tell me to overdo whatever I was supposed to be doing, and what I thought was overdoing it would turn out to be just barely enough—I'm going to have to try to overdo the shading, and then eventually maybe I'll get enough.

The one problem with all her features being so dark was that I fully colored in her eyes (and then thought, "wow! that actually looks like her expression!" because I definitely hadn't captured the expression in my previous drawing)...and then realized the right eye was too far over and had to erase it and move it. Since I had made it so dark, it didn't erase completely. I'm going to have to learn to sketch things in lighter, but I'm already struggling enough to visualize things without that added challenge.

This was also drawn using a 4x4 grid, but I got smart. I figured out that Sharpie would easily show through the paper, which isn't terribly thick. So I drew a grid on a piece of cardstock and slipped it behind the page, and the only thing I drew on the actual drawing page was tiny dots at each corner to keep the grid lined up. Much easier to erase for the finished product!

1. C.O. (age 2)

This is the first face I ever drew. I knew I wanted to start by using a grid to help me lay out the face. After a while, I'll make the grid bigger and bigger (advice from this very helpful webpage) until eventually it's a 1x1 grid and I don't need it. For this first drawing, I drew the grid in light pencil and erased it bit by bit when I didn't need it any longer. However, the indentations on the paper from the grid lines remained, which was not ideal.

I make sure to use different size grids on the photo and the sketch (usually about 3" square for the photo I'm drawing from and about 5" square in the sketchbook). That way, not only am I not tracing but nothing is the same size so I have to really think about proportions, which is the goal.

I borrowed my sister's Sanford Design 3800 drawing pencils for this first drawing. Like all of the following pictures (unless I specify otherwise), it was drawn in a Canson Foundation Sketch sketchbook, 5.5"x8.5", which I picked at JoAnn's because it was cheapest but the paper still felt nice.

Although when you look at specific areas you can tell that I had no idea what I was doing, I think this was pretty good for a first try. I hope to draw this little girl more in the future as my skills improve.