ONLINE ART COURSE – PASTEL PENCILS – HEN

This is the second project in this module. Although I am improving, I still struggle with proportion! I marked the extremities of my drawing before beginning, and it came out much too small! I didn’t use the proportional divider. Apart from this, I am pretty satisfied with the result, even though it is badly placed on the paper.

As before, we began with a sketch to map out the basic shapes. This is where I should have been concentrating more, and lining up with my bottom marker! If you look very carefully, you can just see it towards the bottom of the paper.

This time I used a light coloured paper. The first two or three sheets are damaged at the top left-hand corner, unfortunately. It doesn’t matter as these are course exercise pieces. In this case, I could say the paper has been hen-pecked…

Stage 2, as before, blocking in the colours, starting light and working darker, working gently so as not to destroy the tooth of the paper which would make it impossible to add more layers.

Stage 3 was fixing the colours and adding more detail. I didn’t remember to photograph it at this stage, but went straight on to the final stage, which was adding a background.

I am not always a fan of a background, particularly if it’s very busy as it distracts the eye from the main focus of the drawing. In this case, though, Phil did a slightly textured coloured background on his and I rather liked this.

Here’s a close-up version for a closer-up look. (Well, that’s what close-ups are for, isn’t it.)

The colours I used:

Again, I didn’t have the same colours as Phil. The numbers listed are the ones I used from my set, and the ones in brackets are Phil’s ones, which I substituted as closely as I could.

My hubby says my hen looks grumpy! I showed him the reference, and he agreed that that hen looked grumpy too! I think it’s the way with chickens. I’d be grumpy if I was expected just to lay eggs all the time, and then end up in a pie. (Thinking of the movie “Chicken Run.”)