I am sad to see the end of the coloured pencils module. This has been one of my favourites to do, and I really enjoy working with this medium. After only a very few attempts, I think I have mastered it pretty well, and am looking forward to moving ahead and doing many more drawings. This medium takes time and patience, but it is well worth it, and it is quite relaxing to do.
Self-directed challenge
As always, the final project in the module was the self-directed challenge, when Phil, the teacher, gives us some reference photos and tells us to get on with it without his holding our hand! He does give us a few hints and tips to set us on our way.
This time there was a choice between doing one of three reference photos of animals’ eyes – a dog, a cat and a leopard. This was to be done in a photo-realistic style, building up the layers as he taught us to do in the robin project. The other choice was to draw one or more birds from his reference photos, this time holding back on the fine detail and keeping the layers to a minimum, achieving a pleasing result in the more sketchy style. He said this was to teach us that the photo-realistic style is not the only one that works for coloured pencils.
He also said that if we didn’t want to use his references, we could do one of our choice, perhaps selecting a photo from one of the royalty-free image sites such as Pixabay.
My choice
I have decided to do the animal’s eye and one or more of the birds. For the former, I decided to draw one of our kitty’s eyes rather than an anonymous reference cat, since I have two models close at hand! I went through my photos and most of them were too far away to get a detailed enough image of the eye when zooming in, but I managed to find a few to choose from, and decided on this photo, taken about a year ago.
I cropped the eye right down, and saved it as a rectangle 4 inches x about 3 1/4 inches, so that I could make my drawing exactly the same size.
In close-up:
For this drawing I used my proportional divider. It was quite difficult getting the proportions and angles just right, and I didn’t quite succeed, but it was more or less OK.
When I examined the photo closely, I was amazed at how much brown there was in Ruby’s fur. I’m afraid I rather over-exaggerated this and made her even browner, which is a shame! However, it was the eye that was the main focal point so it didn’t really matter.
I struggled with the fur for a long time, and at one point, thought I was never going to get it right, and the eye looked flat and detached from the fur. It was another example of the “ugly stage” of a picture and I knew I just had to persevere and hope it would come out right in the end. It isn’t perfect, and she is more of a brown tabby than a silver tabby, but one day I shall do a proper coloured pencil portrait of her and get her colouring just right! I also didn’t get the shape of the eye quite right – it is not so wide open and appealing as it is in the photo. She has such beautiful eyes and I wanted to do it justice. I shall do better next time!
Watch this space for the bird drawings, to complete the coloured pencils module.
