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.