This portrait of Chester is my submission for this week’s Old School Sktchy WAX challenge for which the prompt is “Frida”. I’ve drawn lots of people in Frida Kahlo-style flower crowns in the past so today I decided to draw Chester the pharaoh hound instead.
I drew Chester on my iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil using the Procreate app.
This time of year is always my busiest time of year work-wise and fitting in drawing around work is always a bit of a challenge. So I do what I can, breaking up my portrait drawing into manageable sections that I squeeze in between my various work projects and meetings. I think it sometimes means that the portraits look less well thought through than the ones I complete in a single session, but it’s all practice and it’s all learning.
This was drawn on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil using the Procreate app.
This portrait of Sktchy muse Marie was drawn in a Hannehmühle Nostalgie sketchbook with Polychromos coloured pencils.
I’ve been taking a class on drawing with ballpoint pen in the Sktchy Art School taught by Robin Hilthouse. It’s a great course and the key technique is smooth transitions between colours. I’ve enjoyed it enormously and learned a great deal. However, I know don’t have the patience to work in exactly the same way that Robin does, so by the time I was halfway through this, my final practice portrait for the course, I was starting to adapt and move more towards the kind of hatching I do with coloured pencil. I simply don’t have the patience to create the kind of gentle invisible hatching that Robin creates, and I’m not a realistic artist anyway, so I think I’ll be taking what I’ve learned and using it for a more textured hatching, more like that which I use with coloured pencil, which conveys a sense of the person without creating a realistic portrait. I’ll be practicing more in the coming weeks and I’ll have to see where it takes me.
This was drawn in a Moleskine sketchbook with a variety of Bic and Staedtler ballpoint pens. It took about 5 hours to complete.
This is Cece, painted in a Laloran sketchbook with Zecchi Toscana watercolours and finished with Prismacolor coloured pencils.
I’m still working away at my ballpoint pen practice but those portraits take many hours, so I took some time out today to return to my Copic comfort zone and draw one of my favourite Sktchy muses, Giada.
I drew this in my A4 Moleskine with Copic markers and Prismacolor coloured pencils.
I drew Scout in black and white a few days ago for Inktober. I knew when I drew her that I would add colour at some point to that portrait. So here is that same portrait but with colour added in Procreate. She looks older than she should, which is one of the reasons I don’t often draw children – yes, I’m one of those artists who always manages to age children when I draw or paint them.
I added colour on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil in the Procreate app using Lisa Bardot’s gouache brushes and the Procreate luminance brushes.
