The drawing dutchy
Just a Dutchy drawing portraits with soft pastel or graphite pencils.
My pastel drawing of Amjo – walkthrough work in progress.
My first ever commission! To say that I was nervous to start this is an understatement, but I was also super excited to get to work with this! Here I will walk you through the process and steps of a pastel drawing like this with pictures side by side with my explanation.
Before I start any drawing, I edit my reference picture in Krita.
You can use any photo editing/drawing software, I use Krita because I am used to working with it. I rezise/edit the picture to the size of paper I am using, in this case a3. I also make a black and white version and one overexposed version. The black and White I can use to check if my values are right. You take a picture of your drawing, make that black and white in editing software and compare side by side to see if you are close to the greyscale of the reference picture. I rarely use it, but it is nice to have. The overxposed picture will show more color than the original and because of that it is easier to see which colors are “hidden” in a portrait. I try to draw these hidden colors to make things look more realistic. After I have those three versions of my reference picture, I am ready to get to work!
First, I draw an outline and try to get things like nose, ears eyes and such outlined. Now I have that to guide me, I color the eyes in with black but only the eyes and nose. All the other shadows and edge lines are drawn with Dark Sepia because don't use a lot of black in my drawings. In my expierence, black can "muddy" things and alter colors when you accidentally blend it with other colors.
Then I start drawing fur. I don't want to get too detailed here, it's just to get the general idea/feel and base. Its' main purpose is also color blocking so there is no need to draw every single strand of hair. I am careful that I draw the fur I do draw in the direction it is going in my reference picture, otherwise the next layers may look like I have cross-hatched and I do not want that look.
I work mainly with the following pencils right now: Caran d'ache Flesh, Dark flesh and midnight blue. As well as burned sienna (pitt) I go back and forward between adding light and dark. You can see in this picture that i have added a layer of light but I needed to go over it with some darker color to get my values right again.
Now I have glazed (lightly brush) over the whole drawing with burned sienna to get the values a little darker. I also glazed some parts with Sanguine because I needed the fur in some parts to be more reddish/warmer. You can see that the whole drawing is now getting less "stripey" because more pastel is layered on top of other pastel.
The colors are getting more "even" and blended. In these early stages I blend with my fingers as well as a blending stump, depending on whether I just want to push it into the paper or really blend it together. Blending does make the colors a little less vibrant, so you have to be carefull to glaze with color again after blending.
Here I have brought the color back, and I have added more shading. I used blue combined with brown for my shadows because if you just use darker browns the shadows will look flat and not realistic at all.
Now I work on adding more highlights and smoothening out the fur. For some lighter highlights, I add Light flesh 10% or even light flesh 5% (Caran d'ache)
Here I have added a lot more highlights, and I am glazing highlights ever so slightly with a yellow ocre. I leave adding yellow to the later stages of a drawing because in my experience, when you add it too early, it'll mess with every color you lay on top after that and is super hard to correct.
Working on a gazillion small finishing touched and more highlights,
The finished Amjo! She looks rather yellow in her face here, that is just because the picture was taken in artificial light. She is done and now I will frame her and send her to her owner! And keep my fingers crossed, because I am still rather nervous and insecure, so I worry that people wont like it.