Sepia Portrait and New Tutorial

Bonny Chris

8x10 inches

Coloured Pencil on Canson Mi-Teinte Paper



This portrait is of my darling nephew Chris and a huge thank you to his Mum and Dad for allowing me to use their reference photo. By far the most popular portraits that I get asked to do are the graphite ones, but those of you who have been following my blog for a while will now that I generally steer clear of working with graphite as it is not my favourite medium. Hence the motivation for creating this portrait and tutorial. Sepia portraits are a lovely way of still getting a Monochrome look, but with a touch more warmth.

For anyone interested, this 17 page tutorial gives a step by step guide on how to do a sepia portrait, using coloured pencils. I also used zest-it solvent to give the skin a smoother look, however you can still complete the tutorial and portrait without using the Zest-it. For more information, please visit either my website or from my etsy store.

WIP - Mei

This is a WIP of my latest commission - a beautiful leopard called Mei. Doing this commission gave me a renewed passion to do some more artworks featuring Big Cats and so we took a flying visit down to the Canberra Zoo, where they have a wonderful array of big cats. Considering it is the middle of school holidays, we were amazed how quiet it was at the zoo, giving us a glorious day of meandering from enclosure to enclosure. Some of the Big Cats were more co-operative than others in posing for photos. I must admit I had to chuckle a few times, as I got the distinct feeling that a few of the gorgeous Cats knew exactly what I was there for and were deliberately playing cat and mouse with me. As they paced up and down, I would wait up one end of the enclosure for them to return from their pace, upon which they decided take a stretch or a roll up the other end. Quick as a flash I was up the other end for that amazing shot, only to find that they had resumed pacing again. Reminded me so much of my contrary Siamese cat!