Thursday, February 2, 2012

WIP - Heartbreak

This unhappy little fellow is my nephew Jack. The source of his hearbroken little expression? His ride on car had got stuck under the fence. Two year olds have such big burdens to bear!!! His mother, struggling to hide her mirth, managed to capture his anguish and I couldn't resist putting pencil to paper to draw his darling expression. This portrait is being done in pencil on Pastelmat as well, only this time I am using predominantly watercolour pencils. I read of a professional artist who only works with watercolour pencils, as a way of keeping wax bloom at bay. They also have a creamy texture that works really well on the Pastelmat, with minimal shine.

3 comments:

Karla said...

Can already tell this is going to be fantastic! Can't wait to see the finished work.

Sue Clinker said...

How cute :-)

Are you using the watercolour pencils dry?

I use solvent on wax based cps with Pastelmat - not sure if that stops the bloom but it does alter/deepen colours so takes some getting used to.

Unknown said...

Thank you so much Karla and Sue.

It's a tough one Sue. I have never really mastered the use of solvents and yet it seems to be a technique used by lots of coloured pencil artists. I also don't have the patience for the solvent to dry before moving onto extra layers. The watercolour pencils seem to work really well, but I'm still tossing up whether to try fixative with them, so as to make them a little more water resistant (I did a trial piece and the W/C pencils didn't seem to sink in colour as much as the regular pencils). Time will tell! :)