This portrait of Atlas from Sktchy needs more work but I’ve run out of steam. Hatching takes time and effort and right now I’m having a pain and fatigue flare and I don’t have the energy to keep going on it. So I’m leaving it here. Maybe I’ll come back to it another day. Or maybe I won’t…
Drawn on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil using the Procreate app.
For me, part of the fun of drawing is choosing the media to use for a portrait. That’s why I use so many different drawing materials rather than just sticking with one favourite. This portrait of Nik from Sktchy is a great example. In the inspiration photo she’s looking a little dishevelled in the middle of clouds of coloured gas and haze and the question for me was how I could best portray that. Watercolour and coloured pencil seemed the best option and I think they’ve worked well here, especially for the gas in the background.
I used Sennelier watercolours and Prismacolor coloured pencils in a Moleskine watercolour sketchbook.
Back in the land of chronic migraine today so happy simply to have completed this portrait of Ronda from Sktchy. I drew it with Copic markers in my Midori cotton sketchbook.
This is Raul from Sktchy. The inspiration photo is so great – I love drawing machinery and this photo is so funny too, who wouldn’t want to draw it?
Drawn in my Life Noble Note Plain with Bic ballpoint pens.
I decided to switch things up a little by putting my favourite Zecchi watercolours aside for a while and get some of my other watercolour sets out of the drawer. I have several different sets and most of them sit unused for most of the year, especially if I don’t travel at all, as has happened this year. So for this portrait of Daria from Sktchy I used my Sennelier paints.
Sennelier are my favourite of the mass market watercolours – like Zecchi they have a honey binder, and that seems to be what is distinctive about all the paints I like the most. As usual I painted this in my Moleskine watercolour sketchbook.
This is the lovely Ayshin from Sktchy. I totally messed up the headscarf in the portrait so I had to change the colour from a creamy yellow to purple to disguise my disaster which works OK, but isn’t quite what I had planned. I wish I had left the scarf alone as a line drawing and hadn’t attempted to add colour to it at all. There’s a lesson there for me in putting a little more thought into when to stop drawing.
I drew Ayshin in my Life Noble Note Plain with Bic 4-way multicolour ballpoint pens.
I can’t resist a good mirror selfie, especially when there’s a little bit of distortion to make it a bit more fun! This is a portrait of Melek drawn from a really fabulous mirror selfie she posted on Sktchy.
I drew this portrait in my Midori cotton sketchbook with Copic markers and Prismacolor coloured pencils.
I’ve been working on this portrait of Dennis from Sktchy very slowly for days, scratching away on my iPad Pro with the ballpointy brush. I’m finding building up layers of colour through slow hatching so very meditative.
Some days I’m tired and I want an easy draw. It’s so hot here on the south coast of England right now it’s hard to find the energy to do anything so I’m taking the path of least resistance. That means hanging out in my Copic comfort zone today for this portrait of James, drawn in my Midori cotton sketchbook.
Sometimes an inspiration image is so great it tells a story all by itself. You don’t need to do nothing except draw or paint it. Once you’ve done that the story is there on the page for the viewer to see and interpret as they see fit. The inspiration photo for this portrait of Lucia from Sktchy is one of those images. It’s such a perfect photo of a young woman with her hair in big pink rollers, not the kind of image very often these days, yet something that speaks of a very familiar past to anyone born more than 30 or so years ago. I love it and I loved painting it.
I drew this with a Unipin dark grey brush pen, painted it with Zecchi Toscana watercolours and finished it with Prismacolor coloured pencils in a Moleskine watercolour sketchbook.
drawing faces 