Pencils4Tea speed sketching event

Day Nineteen of my 365 Day Sketch Challenge

Continuing with day nineteen of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. There’s something about the first day of a new year to invigorate some inspiration, and today was the first day for joining Pencils4Tea speed sketching event.

Drawing Earthsworld Challenge

I did today’s Drawing Earthsworld Challenge from Facebook, and today I went a little larger than usual, and filled up an A6 page size. The graphic design of his shirt was what attracted me to sketch more than a simple portrait, and I applied three different neutral shades making sure to leave plenty of white areas.

After I’d done the hair and hat, the last element to render was the skin tone.

Cowboy Skin Tone

This skin tone was three separate layers, applied on top of each other when still slightly damp, to get the colours to merge a little, but also to stay visible as individual layer.

The base layer was a neutral grey – I wanted him to look old and worn. This natural grey was the leftover combination of the three neutral tones (grey, blue, and brown) that I used for his shirt. Then I diluted it with water.

I added some opera rose to this natural grey tint to warm up the skin tone, and then added some French Ultramarine to create the shadow area tonal areas.

The combination of these skin tone layers adds a bumpy texture to his skin tone, and adds a real rugged feel to it. The paint wasn’t really painted on – more of dropped into areas I thought needed the warm or cool touches.

I used the Earthsworld source photo as reference for the tonal values, by removing the saturation and bumping up the contrasts on the source photo.

Pencils4Tea Speed Sketching Event

In preparation for tonights speed sketching event I cut out some 7cm square and 7cm x 10 cm pieces of watercolour paper. I usually sketch directly into my sketchbook, but I decided I wanted to experiment with force-limiting the size of my portraits.

Some hits and misses in this bunch, but were a few (especially the trio or portraits featured in the header) that I was pleased with. When you have a varying time limit, there’s only so much you can capture, so you have to aim for expressiveness and personality rather than perfectionism.

I used a Staedtler pigment liner 0.05, and Tombow N95 for shading. Then used some opera rose, pale yellow, and cobalt turquoise light to apply a pastel wash for the clothing and some of the skin tones.

My default eye-colour is turquoise, it’s a style decision I use a lot. I guess that’s how a personal style develops – it’s just a collection of elements that you use repeatedly, almost on automatic pilot.

For information about Live Portrait Sketching events, check out this listing here. There’s multiple opportunities each week to engage in some portrait speed sketching. To cement my commitment to this helpful portrait activity, I’ve just assigned a new A4 sketchbook to all of my speed sketching activities. The paper is a bit flimsy, so if I sketch directly in it, it’ll have to be with watercolour pencils or pencils. But maybe I’ll continue by prepping pre-cut watercolour squares and rectangles to ink onto, and then stick them in.