Step by Step Tutorial on doing Realistic Portraits using Coloured pencils and Zest-it

This brand new 26 page tutorial is now available for a small fee from my website at http://www.miniatureartbykhull.com/tutorials_34.html. It is a comprehensive step by step guide on how to achieve realistic portraits using coloured pencils and Zest-it pencil blend on Pastelmat. There is also a section on how to use Pan pastels in combination with the coloured pencils to achieve a softly blended background. This particular tutorial uses a range of different brands of pencils, however, by using the Coloured Pencil Conversion Chart which is also available from by website, you can work out which of your own pencils to substitute for the ones used in this tutorial, so there is no need to go out and buy a whole lot of new pencils.

Joy

Joy

8x11 inches

Coloured Pencils and solvent on Pastelmat

I entitled this artwork Joy for two reasons - the look of sheer glee on the face of my little neice Bailey and the absolute joy I had working on this portrait, I am definitely a fan of working with the Zest-it on the Pastelmat. It enabled me to get a lovely smooth canvas of skin in a relatively short time frame, and also smoothed out the texture of the Pastelmat, allowing me to add nice crisp details where they were needed. The only aspect I struggled with, was waiting for the paper to dry between applications of solvent before doing more pencil work - patience is not one of my virtues, but I think it did pay off in the end! :)

What a difference some solvent makes!

I must admit, I haven't had a lot of success in the past using solvents with coloured pencils, and yet I know a lot of pencil artists do use it with amazing results. I often seem to get a rather blotchy result, but on the Pastelmat, I found it really easy and am quite pleased with the results so far. Obviously, I still have a fair bit of work to do on this portrait, but whereas Heartbreak took somewhere between 20 and 30 hours to complete, this one has only had about 4-5 hours work on it and is already well under way. I also found that I could layer the pencil and solvent (zest-it) without previous layers lifting away.