Monday, July 21, 2014

Sketch: The Princess Bride

Here's a recent Daily Doodle topic I did over on Twitter. The topic was The Princess Bride. I nearly did Inigo Montoya, because I like to ink solid black hair... But I decided to be lazy and go the easy route with Princess Buttercup instead, since I was actually very busy, and as we all know, my default sketch state is 'girl in pretty dress' :p



The colour version above I did in Photoshop later, when I had a spare half hour. Originally I did a black and white watercolour version - I had bought some cool grey ecoline for use in the picture book I'm currently working on. I'd never used it before and wanted to practice on something unimportant before I potentially ruined a freshly-inked double page spread. :p


This is a scan, but here's a photo showing a bit more of the metallic golds that I dug out of my pen collection. I combined two gold pens and they turned out remarkably hard to photograph:


And here is the line work. I used a Pentel Brush Pen, in my Moleskine Watercolour Sketchbook:


I had to look up references for the costume, mainly because I've only seen the film twice, but I didn't use any one specific reference. 

Pentel Brush Pen in Moleskine watercolour sketchbook | cool grey Ecoline | Adobe Photoshop CC with Wacom Intuos 5 


Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Portrait: Gregory Peck

Another commission, this time of Gregory Peck. This commissioner is very fond of old movie stars and is getting quite a collection of pencil portraits. I've previously done Rita Hayworth, Gloria Grahame, Robert Redford, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift for the same client. Normally I don't do star portrait commissions but I started this series many years back and can't very well refuse now. 


I'm pretty sure this is from a publicity image for Twelve o'clock High, but I may be wrong. I started this before Kim Novak, and after Rita Hayworth, and it was a relief not to have any feathers, sequins or rhinestones to contend with!  Here's a progress animation. The whole thing took approximately 17.5 hours.


This is a graphite portrait. I used a 0.5 mechanical pencil with a #B lead, and an #8B solid graphite pencil, along with a selection of blending tools and erasers. For more information on my portraiture tools, please see this tutorial.

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