Colored Pencil Portrait Class – Work in Progress

Souzi – Work in Progress

Copyright 2012, Valerie Jones

What fun we are having in the colored pencil portrait class!  Four wonderful artists and myself are working on “Souzi”.

This is our second week to work on this portrait.  Don’t let the hollow eyes frighten you!  We will have those beauties put in next week.

We are using the Prismacolor Portrait Pencil Set  to complete the skin tones.  We are also using Ann Kullberg's Skin Tone Bar  as a guideline to select our color values.

The first overall layers or “washes” of skin tone value was put over the whole faces except the eyes and highlight areas.  The colors used in these washes are: Cream, Light Peach, Jasmine, Pink Rose, Beige.  This was done on the first week of working on Souzi.

The second week, we started modeling her facial features a little more.  We used Sand on most of the face.  Some areas of the face aren’t quite as yellow, so we only used it as needed.

The next color was Yellow Ochre.  Souzi’s facial features really started coming to life when using this color.  We used Yellow Ochre only in the shadow areas of the face.  These shadow areas are on the right-facing side of her face and around the shadows of her eyes, nose, mouth, and chin.

After using Yellow Ochre, we moved on to Peach.  We put Peach everywhere on the skin except the highlighted areas.  We leave the highlighted areas the white of the paper.  Once color hits these, it is extremely difficult to remove.

We moved on to Salmon Pink after the Peach.  Salmon Pink was used only in the darkest part of the shadow areas.

Class time ended way too soon!  We are looking forward to next week when we add the eyes and maybe a few more skin tones.

See you again soon!